I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Apr 2014
Interview
They searched my profile on LinkedIn and contacted me for this role. The recruiter asked for a time to talk. She asked me a few sample questions and told me the sample answer formats to it as well. Then she sent me a document with the leadership values for Amazon and said that the document gave a fair idea of what may be asked in the interview.
In the first interview, the hiring manager called and asked the usual behavioral questions. However, what I didn't expect was him to ask me a dollar amount or impact for every statement in the resume and for every answer to the question. This became irritating after a certain time because it was evident that he was following a questionnaire template and wanted to fill answers in the template from the interview result. A manager should know that while most of the business situations are quantifiable, not all are. Also, when you are managing an account, there are some things that you do to build relationships and can also be a financial loss, but the value lies in the brand building and the relationship building.
I didn't clear the interview which I gauged from the interview. When the process started with the recruiter I was quite impressed, but as the process moved ahead, the process wasn't impressive at all.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What was the dollar impact for every statement in the resume and for every example I gave
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA)
Interview
Sent my CV to an ex-colleague and was contacted by a recruitment coordinator. The initial contact was very promising, including a detailed explanation of what to expect. The problem is that the process was not as described. The recruiter never got back to me within the expected 2 days after each interview and I had to repeatedly contact her for an update. The two phone interviews I had were weeks apart. Both were very similar, where I was asked to solve technical problems. The recruiter messed up agreed times, the interviewers called me up to 20 mins late and one interview was cancelled 5 mins beforehand. After many weeks, I was invited for a third phone interview, only it turned out to be a different person on a different team and for a different position! So I can only imagine I was unsuccessful with the first team. I will write another review about the interview process for the other position. The interviewers both seemed quite arrogant and although they asked predominantly technical questions, they both admitted that the role was mostly about feature prioritisation and program management, since the senior developers handle the technical stuff - go figure.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Based on a list of when buses entered & left for the day, design an algorithm for the bus depot manager to determine the resourcing requirements for tomorrow.
Design an ad server that returns relevant ads from a store of 100m unique ads. It must be fast and must scale across 1b different pages and 1b requests per day.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jun 2012
Interview
Amazon found me on Career Builder and reached out to schedule an initial interview. I talked to a contracted recruiter on the phone then was put into the interview loop. I had a phone screen interview with a member of the team then a more detailed 1-hour technical interview where I was quizzed a little deeper. After I passed that I was invited to Seattle for a day of intense interviews.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Amazon has decided to compete directly with Netflix. Design the system (top to bottom) that will help us win the battle.