I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2012
Interview
I applied through Amazon's website. I was contacted by a recruiter not too long after (< 2 weeks) to set up the first of two phone screens. There was about a week in between the two phone interviews, and after the second there was about another week before I got contacted to arrange the trip out to Seattle for the on-site.
The phone interviews were very standard SE interviews. We used an online text editor for coding questions, and there were also higher-level design and algorithm questions.
The on-site consisted of four technical interviewers with engineers on the team I was being interviewed for (Kindle) and a lunch with a manager of the same team. They asked more personal questions during the on-site than is typical (from my experience), but each interview focused around one technical problem to solve on the whiteboard. The lunch was also an interview with the interviewer asking so many questions I didn't get to finish my food, actually.
I wasn't too confident with my solutions (I was being sloppy and tripping over syntax), but I was contacted during my trip home from Seattle to extend an offer. I had an offer from my #1 choice though, so I ended up declining. The impression I got from the engineers I talked to is that you can get worked very hard at Amazon, and while the engineers would say that the policies were fair (since if you were working long hours you were working to fix your mistakes), when I pressed the issue they seemed to waffle a bit on it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing too crazy. Standard data structures / algorithms / design type questions.
Interview by recuriter, Phone interview over Chime with one easy Leet code problem and 2 behavioral questions. Although the interviewer was very casual at the start of the conversation, it quickly changed into behavioral questions at the start.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Encoding optimization algorithm and talk about a project you did recently.
First round is just leet code coding which screens through AI before going into live coding. Pretty simple and straighforward. Not too tough. Recruiter walks through it pretty nicely. Not sure how many rounds there are exactly
After submitting my application for the Software Engineer position, I received an invitation to complete an automated Online Assessment (OA). The assessment consisted of standard coding challenges, primarily focusing on algorithmic and data structure problems. Unfortunately, a few days after submitting my solutions for the assessment, I received an email informing me that I would not be moving forward in the interview process and was rejected.