I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Boston, MA) in Dec 2011
Interview
This was a recruiting drive. I was contacted by email and asked if I wanted to participate in a recruiting drive in Boston. I had 4 hour long interviews one right after the other at a hotel. Amazon had rented out a suit of conference rooms for the event. The interviewers were pleasant, and seem to have a set of questions (or types of question) that they asked. Each interviewer seem to focus on different things. The interview process was very STAR (situation, task, action, result) oriented. Look this up in the web, it's worth it.
After the question, you were given a problem to work on. The problems are not difficult, just take your time and talk it out. Talking through the problem is really important since it can save you from going down the wrong path.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There was nothing especially difficult. I'm not allowed to discuss the specific problems but I will give some general answers. There were a couple of cute problems, but mainly the problems were related to searching some space. I had 2 problems that required breadth first searches. A problem which looked more difficult than it was. This is probably the hardest type of problem, because it requires that you think about it and play with it until you see the simple solution. Think out loud, this is important.
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.
Recruiter reaches out after applying through Amazon careers, no referral. Had an initial OA, then after a month had four rounds in two days - three coding one system design. Each round had 30 min behavioral and 30 min coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were mainly hashmap, sliding window and interval related.