I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
I applied through the employee referral program, but never heard back from Amazon about the specific application. Instead I was contacted by a recruiter later for a completely different role. Within a week I had a technical phone screen. I was told to prepare for high-level model discussion that could even include my own experience. Instead, it was a drill of brain teasers and regurgitation of model assumptions that could be memorized. The interviewer also used a screen sharing application for coding that took 5 minutes to load because they hadn't used it before. I was told the interview would be 30-40 minutes, but instead it took 1 hour. I received no feedback except that I did not move forward in the process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What are the assumptions for using a logistic regression? What is the loss function for it? How would you build a recommendation system in certain scenarios?
I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Boston, MA)
Interview
Very Professional. Before both the phone and on-site interview, I had a call with a technical recruiter who told me exactly what to expect for each interview. There were lots of behavioral questions, talking about previous projects I had done, questions about how various ML algorithms work, and coding questions. None of the questions were too tricky. All the interviewers were very nice. Took less than 24 hours to reply with interview outcome.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What ML algorithms do you know? Follow up questions asked me to describe some of the algorithms I had listed, then went into details (what is the loss function, why is LSTM better than RNN)
Coding Questions: Similar to easy/medium LeetCode questions.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2018
Interview
I got the interview from a friend's reference. The recruiter scheduled a phone screen interview first, and I talked to a hiring manger for 40 minutes. At the beginning, she asked me to talked about some of my own research. I think that was just a warming-up before the real question she wanted to ask. The real question is they collected purchase record data at a store for the whole year, so how do you find out the major reason why customers walked into a store. It's an open question, and I think they really want to find somebody to help with this specific question. I was not very sure about what answer they are looking for. I didn't make it to the next step.