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.
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Los Angeles, CA) in Feb 2013
Interview
I was contacted by an Amazon recruiter via LinkedIn. I interviewed with them previously (unsuccessfully) and looks like they had me in their database.
The recruiter told me that they have a hiring event in LA and if I am interested, I can try. Of course I was interested. I have been obsessed with this job for a very long time. I failed once, but I learned a lot since. I decided to give it a try.
The event was in three days. Sure, I read up on some algorithms, but there is not much one can do in this kind of time. What I knew would have to be enough for success or failure.
They interviewed people in the hotel in LA. You get a separate room, and interviewers walk in, and each one of them gets about 45-50 minutes with you. They ask some theoretical questions (for example, design some classes for a chat system) and some whiteboard coding.
As to the coding, there was a lot of recursion and binary trees. There was nothing extremely hard or undoable, no NP-hard problems I was afraid of. I had 4 technical interviews and one talk with the recruiter. The interviewers were great - friendly and pleasant.
I got through without glaring errors or missed questions. But I feared that I was not brilliant enough for them. I was right.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
It was hard to answer behavioral / situation questions. I am very bad at selling myself. It is probably good to practice these:
Describe a simple but great idea that you have successfully implemented.
Describe what you would improve in your current team.
Describe the biggest challenge that you faced in your work.
Describe the situation when your team could not make a deadline and how you handled it.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
Contacted by an Amazon recruiter asking to fill up a questionnaire.
First interview started with the interviewer asking little bit about my back ground. We quickly transitioned into the coding exercise. The problem involved palindromes. I was trying to be verbally descriptive while coding the exercise. I felt a little rushed to code.
Second interview got straight to the coding exercise. The problem was around pair identification After the solution there were a few questions around optimization and possible choice of data structures. Better experience with the interviewer this time.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you optimize the implementation that you provided from O(n2)?
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
Had about 2 rounds. They asked mostly on data structures.And program on sorting and binary search trees. Questions were like whats Hash map,Linked List? Advantages of hash map over array list. Difference bet tree and BST