I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2010
Interview
The interview process consisted of four technical interviews and one lunch interview. The latter interview was intended to introduce me to my potential future superior, and three of the other interviewers were potential colleagues in the same team. One interviewer was not from the same team, per Amazon's interview policy.
All the interviewers were very friendly, helpful and polite. The interview questions were all technical. Several algorithmic, data structure, and thought problems.
Turnaround time was pretty fast. My interview was just before a major holiday, on a Friday. According to the recruiter, I would have gotten an offer or rejection on the following Tuesday. Basically how the recruitment process goes is: interviews take place, interviewers meet on the following business day to discuss the candidate over lunch, and then either an offer or rejection is announced on the next business day. So overall, the whole process should take 3 business days. In my case, a holiday got in the way, stretching the process out to 1 week and 4 days.
What would be the best data structure for a name-to-phone number lookup, and what would be the average search time? (As a follow up: What could you change in order to improve that search time?
I applied through other source. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in Jun 2008
Interview
Did phone screen with senior engineer and with potential group manager. Went to onsite interview in Seattle. All day interview with HR, several area specific engineers, one senior engineer and the business owner of the group I would work for. Interview was mostly technical except for the business owner. Lunch was during one of the interview sessions. It was an exhausting long day. A bit of obscurity in the technical questions and the usual geek superiority posturing. Overall a decent process. HR was definitely the weak link with poor scheduling and time management.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
The functional details of signal processing in differential SCSI.