I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Dec 2012
Interview
I applied through a friend (which you should totally do if it's an option).
I had 2 phone interviews which were pretty basic for the most part. One was dynamic programming and the second question just had to do with designing a DB. The second interview required no code. It was just a little bit of pseudo code and some OO questions. The main problem was keeping calm but if you practice problems a lot you should be able to get past these fairly easily.
Then I was flown out to Seattle for several in-person interviews. I got an HR interview, 2 technical interviews (roughly the same difficulty of before but I was even more nervous), a lunch interview with the manager. I advise getting something easy to chew because you'll be talking the entire time. It can be very awkward if you're not prepared (which I really wasn't). Then I had 2 more technical interviews which I found to be easier because I was getting better feedback.
Interview by recuriter, Phone interview over Chime with one easy Leet code problem and 2 behavioral questions. Although the interviewer was very casual at the start of the conversation, it quickly changed into behavioral questions at the start.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Encoding optimization algorithm and talk about a project you did recently.
First round is just leet code coding which screens through AI before going into live coding. Pretty simple and straighforward. Not too tough. Recruiter walks through it pretty nicely. Not sure how many rounds there are exactly
After submitting my application for the Software Engineer position, I received an invitation to complete an automated Online Assessment (OA). The assessment consisted of standard coding challenges, primarily focusing on algorithmic and data structure problems. Unfortunately, a few days after submitting my solutions for the assessment, I received an email informing me that I would not be moving forward in the interview process and was rejected.