I applied through an employee referral. The process took 9 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jun 2011
Interview
My interview process at Amazon started when I was referred by a friend who worked there. I was then contacted by the team lead who kindly took me out to coffee and a lunch to discuss the team. To further encourage me to interview, the team lead allowed me to come in for a few hours to pair program with a couple of the developers on the team and see how their agile development process worked on a typical day.
The next step was for me to do a technical phone screen. The interviewer was very nice and asked one technical question and one design question.
The last step was the day long in-house interview which consisted of two one person interviews, two pair interviews, and a lunch interview. Half of the people who interviewed me were nice and patient, making the interview a conversation more than a grilling. However, the other half definitely made it feel like more of a grilling by becoming impatient (even turning red) when I wasn't giving a good answer.
The team lead called me personally to tell me they decided not to hire me.
Overall, I have mixed impressions from this interview. I am very grateful for the personal touch of the recruiting process and the opportunity to see the team on the inside, but I was a little taken aback by the interviewers that were a bit aggressive and frustrated when I wasn't doing well on the interview questions.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
What is the difference between arrays and linked lists?
A part of developing a good search algorithm is determining how close the query terms are to one another in a document. Develop an algorithm for finding the shortest distance between query terms in a document.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Sydney)
Interview
I can't comment much. I submitted an application for the software engineer position, and not even a minute later, I received an auto rejection email from Amazon (never received an online assessment).
2 behavioral 2 coding not very difficult. Behavioral is tell me about a time you took responsibility beyond your role and biggest accomplishment. The process is exactly the guideline they posted for interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
tell me about a time you took responsibility beyond your role
It was a 2-3 round process, depending on how your interview went, with increasingly hard DSA questions followed by some HR and behavioural questions. First round was mostly easy and medium leetcode, followed by medium and hard questions in the second round and above on more complex topics.
