For context, I ended up withdrawing my application in the screening process. I'm sharing my experience so others can know what to expect in the process.
My experience might be a little out of the norm, but hopefully recruiting teams at Amazon monitor this page and make corrections.
To begin, I found the job listing on LinkedIn and applied directly on the Amazon website. It took approximately 2 months before I was contacted. I mention this because, in my experience, this usually hasn't taken longer than 30 days if a company is interested.
The first contact came to me via automated email that requested I provide 4 available time slots for a 45 minute conversation. It took some back and forth, but we aligned to a time. While I was doing this I got a separate email from a person in HR requesting availability. I thought that was odd since I'd just confirmed with the automated email scheduling. When I informed her of that, she informed me that the two events were indeed separate. So I was able to align with her as well, for the day before the time I was already scheduled to speak.
Here's where it starts to get messy. Roughly one hour before our scheduled time to speak, the HR contact emailed me asking to reschedule (we'd aligned 10 days earlier). I get that things come up, but 1 hour out seems unprofessional, as if she waited until the last minute to inform me. I wasn't available to speak at the times she requested, so we cancelled.
The following day I spoke to a team member about the role. In our conversation I learned that she wasn't the hiring manager, and that the didn't work on the team I was interviewing for. She worked for an adjacent team that worked with the team I was interviewing for. When I informed her that I hadn't yet spoken to someone in HR she was surprised, and said that isn't normally how the process goes. She made note of this to pass on. She asked if I wanted to postpone until I had the time to meet with HR. I declined and proceeded with this conversation. It went well, but she obviously couldn't share salary info or go into specifics about the day-to-day of the position we were discussing.
After this discussion, I reached back out to my HR contact to request comp and benefit information. She requested time for a conversation. I didn't think this was the best use of our time because I was really only interested in the salary information. She was insistent that we speak because she had more information about the position. So we set up a time to discuss. When we spoke, she seemed unprepared for the conversation. She informed me that this wasn't a leadership role, and she didn't seem familiar with potential growth opportunities. She didn't have answers for an of my others questions about the role like she'd indicated. This was particularly frustrating to me for two reasons. First, in an ideal world, I would have spoken to her first, so she should have been armed with this information. Second, she was adamant that she had information to share. Once we got through that we moved to compensation where she proceeded to give me a $50k range (exact words were early to mid 100's). I've never been given a range so big. When I pressed on why the range was so wide she pointed to potential stock bonuses that could be negotiated/awarded. However, she didn't seem to have an understanding of how they worked. At the end I told her my expectations and there was a pretty sizeable gap. Knowing this it would have been most professional to just indicate that we were in different places and move. Instead she said she'd still recommend me to move forward in screening (that had already been done by the previous team member I spoke with), and speak with the hiring manager about my compensation desires. Why? You know that we're pretty far apart on compensation and that I'm likely not going to tuck into your budget for the role. Why take up more people's time just to potentially end with a declined offer?
I hope that my experience isn't indicative of others interviewing here. The role didn't fit with my goals, I accept that, it happens. However, the handling of the process by the HR member was woefully unprofessional. She's either been instructed to be ambiguous or she was unprepared. Based on how she handling scheduling and pre-interview communication, I'm going to go with the latter.
