I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2015
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter on Linkedin. I was given a timed coding exercise to complete on a website. After that I was invited to a recruitment event organized in Europe. The face to face interviews were nice. In the beginning me and other guys sitting in a hotel room were told that there would be 3 interviews for each person but if there was need they could invite some people for the 4th one too(and I was).
During for interviews the format was more or less the same. I had to answer questions about my background, some technical problems and coding on whiteboard.
The thing that bothered me throughout the whole interview process was that there was no clear description of what I was supposed to work on. I didn't have much to say about what I wanted to work on and they decided on my behalf for what role I fitted best(it was something I had absolutely no interest nor previous experience) and which location(not the location I wanted in the first place).
Overall it was a positive experience, talking to smart people in the interviews and solving interesting questions. But for the reasons I explained I ended up declining their offer.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write a method that returns true if the two given strings were anagrams.
You are given a stream of characters and a list of valid tokens. Write a method that returns true if the character stream only consists of valid tokes. (Note: number of valid tokens is very big)
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.