I applied online. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2013
Interview
Applied for a intern position last year. Apparently all positions were full at the time and invited me to interview for a full time position this year instead.
Started off as 3 online technical questions. Know your basic data structures and algorithms in and out and it will be (and should be) a breeze. Remember to relax though.
If you pass they will invite you to a onsite interview. Amazon will take very good care of you during the interview process, flight, rooming, expenses will be all paid for (within reason).
The onsite interview will start off with lunch with a bunch of other candidates and some interviewers. Don't worry, you are NOT competing against each other, Amazon needs every smart person they can get.
After lunch they will move you to your testing room, where you stay and 4 interviewer will come in and out with various HR questions combined with the programming question.
Other --
Amazon will give you documents on what to expect during the interview. Honestly I think the process is very fair as they don't throw any curve balls.
Tips --
* Again, I cannot stress enough to know your data structures and algorithms (graph traversals, structures of dynamic programming, etc). They are the building blocks for solving any type of programming problem.
* Talk, no matter how stupid it sounds. Talk out what you're doing. Talk if you're stuck, talk if you have an idea, talk as you write down line for line.
* Always remember to smile this should be easy as you should be enjoying this. If not, you might be in the wrong field.
Complaints:
Being bombarded by 4 interviewers and while your brain is racing as fast as possible is exhausting. Amazon does not pay/reimburse alcoholic purchases. As many fellow interviewees genuinely wish to de-stress afterwards.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Honoring the NDA. If you want to be prepared, take a look at your old programming assignments. (Data structures, algorithms) can you do it from scratch? Most of it complete under an hour? What if they change it to another variant? Can you recognize it?
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.
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.