Software Developer applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 67% positive. To compare, the company-average is 61.5% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
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I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2010
Interview
I had 2 phone interviews and one on-site one.
Phone interviews were very easy. Some algorithm questions in addition to some OO concepts.
The only weird thing about the phone interview is that you should read your program word by word for the interviewer when he/she asks you to implement an algorithm.
On-site interview was some how difficult. It was an one-day interview consists of 6 different interviews with different people.
One these guys is the Bar-raiser which is the most important one. Failing in his/her interview may cause you to fail whole the interview even if you do your best in other interviews.
I applied through other source. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in May 2011
Interview
I got two rounds of phone interviews, each separated by two weeks. Two interviewers are all engineers not HR. So they asked technical questions most of the time. Other questions are normal, like how did you hear about our group? why Amazon? Describe a project you did before, and state the difficulty, how you overcome it. The technical questions are about binary tree depth, sort large data file. I didn't code well, but talked most of the time. Anyway, I got rejected.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 9 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jun 2011
Interview
My interview process at Amazon started when I was referred by a friend who worked there. I was then contacted by the team lead who kindly took me out to coffee and a lunch to discuss the team. To further encourage me to interview, the team lead allowed me to come in for a few hours to pair program with a couple of the developers on the team and see how their agile development process worked on a typical day.
The next step was for me to do a technical phone screen. The interviewer was very nice and asked one technical question and one design question.
The last step was the day long in-house interview which consisted of two one person interviews, two pair interviews, and a lunch interview. Half of the people who interviewed me were nice and patient, making the interview a conversation more than a grilling. However, the other half definitely made it feel like more of a grilling by becoming impatient (even turning red) when I wasn't giving a good answer.
The team lead called me personally to tell me they decided not to hire me.
Overall, I have mixed impressions from this interview. I am very grateful for the personal touch of the recruiting process and the opportunity to see the team on the inside, but I was a little taken aback by the interviewers that were a bit aggressive and frustrated when I wasn't doing well on the interview questions.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
What is the difference between arrays and linked lists?
A part of developing a good search algorithm is determining how close the query terms are to one another in a document. Develop an algorithm for finding the shortest distance between query terms in a document.