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.
Recruiter screen, followed by an online coding assessment and then a technical phone interview. The final round was a virtual onsite loop with multiple interviews covering data structures, system design, debugging, and Amazon Leadership Principles. The technical questions were practical but time-constrained, and the behavioural questions required specific examples using the STAR format.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a scalable URL shortening service and explain how you would handle high read traffic, collisions, database schema, expiration, and basic monitoring.
That moment when the interviewer asked about finding indices in an array for a target sum was wild — I had just tackled something identical while prepping on PracHub. The interview included a technical round with another question about designing an in-memory LRU cache and a behavioral question about meeting tight deadlines. After a smooth discussion, I was told I'd received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, the process felt pretty straightforward and not overly challenging.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of integers return the indices of two numbers summing to a target
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.