I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Irvine, CA) in Sept 2022
Interview
Had to complete a leetcode exercise to get my foot through the door. I had about 2 hours to complete two problems related to bit manipulation and array organization.
Afterwards I got contacted by an internal recruiter. The process was a bit messy, schedules kept changing and they kept asking me to accommodate. The recruiter sent me a rundown of things to prepare for the night before the actual interview. As the title suggests, I interviewed for Embedded Software, so most of the topics in the resource covered embedded concepts (bit manipulation, addressing, thread safety, protocols). None of the questions asked by the interviewers covered my title even remotely. Majority had to do with algorithms for a generic software engineering role, so there was an obvious mismatch there.
The interviews were split over two days. One day, met with 4 different people each mostly asking about generic STARS questions and ending the interview with a question about algorithms. Only one interview was with the team lead and actually focused on the job title.
Overall it was a complete mess. I felt blindsided by the lack of focus on their end and it was exhausting to go through a gauntlet back to back.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Name a time you had issues with a co-worker and how did you resolve it?
Medium technical problem that could be solved within time. I wish there were more behavioral questions but interviewer provided only technical problems. The interviewer didn't seem interested in going over resume or my particular skill, which led to providing non-tailored technical problems.
Recruiter call, online coding assessment, online interview, in person interview. Incompetent recruiter told me that the interview was going to be about embedded coding but it was actually system design.
The entire process went smoothly, starting with the initial recruiter phone call and followed by a technical interview with a software engineer. The technical discussion was heavily focused on embedded‑systems concepts, particularly bit manipulation, bitwise operations, and low‑level programming fundamentals.