I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Hyderābād) in Jan 2012
Interview
Recruiter made a couple of calls prior to confirm my availability for the interview, When I arrived at the site, I am impressed by their hospitality.
I was asked to take up a written test which lasted for about 2 hours. When its complete, They gave me the feedback within 10 minutes.
The second round of interview was 1:1 with another analyst on couple of business reporting scenarios (SQL). After its done, I got a break of 1 Hour for lunch
The third round of interview was 1:1 with another analyst on couple of data loading strategies. Looks like this guy got a little bit of ego
The fourth round was 1:1 with the manager, evaluating my attitude and couple of questions on SDLC and project architectures. Later after that, I was asked to leave for the day & wait for the feedback.
After 1 week I got the reply saying
We hope you are doing fine! It was really wonderful to talk with you recently and we appreciate the time you spent with Amazon.
Unfortunately, we are unable to take your candidature further, at the moment. However, your credentials are extremely impressive and we wish to retain your details on our active database. We shall get back to you as soon as another similar opportunity opens up.
We wish you luck in your future endeavors and thank you once again for your interest in Amazon.com
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Write a SQL to explode the data from orders table based on quantity ordered for each product
Ex: A product book if ordered with quantity 3, Then i should get the output as 3 rows with each record having quantity 1.
How do you recover a failed insert statement which is loading millions of records into a table containing billions of records.
Hint: oracle partitioning
The interview process includes a SQL test, an initial recruiter call, and a final five-round loop featuring technical questions and discussions focused on Amazon leadership principles with different team members.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked a key question focused on both technical depth and culture fit: how you apply your skills to solve real problems, along with examples demonstrating alignment with Amazon’s leadership principles.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA)
Interview
Interviewed for Business Analyst role at Amazon and honestly the process felt exhausting and impersonal.
The interviewers seemed far more focused on checking boxes against the 14 Leadership Principles than actually understanding the candidate or having a genuine conversation. Almost every question was another version of a STAR behavioral scenario, even when it barely related to the actual role.
The process felt extremely rehearsed and rigid. There was little effort to make the candidate feel comfortable or valued, and it often felt like they had already decided the outcome before the interview even started.
Technical and analytical depth barely mattered compared to how perfectly you could package stories into Amazon’s preferred format. If you don’t have polished STAR stories memorized for every possible situation, the process can feel unnecessarily difficult and draining.
Overall, one of the most mentally exhausting interview experiences I’ve had.
The basic STAR format, but the team was not clear about what they were looking for. The recruiter was not very responsive and took a long time to schedule the calls