I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Amazon (Bellevue, WA) in Jan 2024
Interview
The interviewer firstly told me to introduce myself and my research area, then asked me a technical question, finally he asked me a BQ question. The time took around 50 minutes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical question: Four dices at beginning. Throw them at each round and remove the one as long as 6 is obtained. How many rounds it take to remove all dices ?
I am in the optics industry, so this might not be helpful for comp sci kids. For the coding interview, I was given two questions: one was a leetcode easy and the second was a medium in difficulty. I was asked to merge intervals for the leetcode medium.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Cambridge, East of England, England) in May 2024
Interview
6 hour interview, including a 45 minute presentation of previous research (with 15min QA that didn't happen because there were no questions).
>50% on LP questions. Coding questions were done very weirdly, coding in a notepad, very open ended which made it difficult to understand what the interviewer actually wanted.
Interviewers forget about previous answers, multiple times I was asked something and said "we can do X and Y because (...), but if that is not possible then we can do Z" and the interviewer would say "oh, I think you could have done X as well".
After 6 hours of on-site interviews, on a friday, the recruiter asked to schedule a call with a message that said "would love to schedule" and "looking forward to talking to you", turns out it was just a rejection.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me a time where you thought you wouldn't be delivering a project on time.
... when the companies interest and the client interest were not aligned.
... when you had to ask for time/effort to do a deep dive on a techinical aspect.