The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2009
Interview
Submitted resume via an old boss who currently works at Amazon.
After about 3 weeks, got a call from the recruiter for an initial phone screen the next week. Phone screen took an hour and involved highly technical questions with no real non-technical questions other than "Why do you want to work at Amazon?"
Two days later, the recruiter called back and asked to schedule another phone screen. This happened the following week. Format was very similar to the first one - All technical questions and a few questions about my experience.
Two days after the 2nd phone screen, received an email stating they'd like to fly me up for an on-site interview. Fly up to Seattle day before the interview, and got to look around the town.
The actual on site interview process consisted of 5 developer interviews that were about 45 minutes each. These interviews were heavily white-board based and involved high level design questions, low level coding questions, and debugging / support process questions. Interviewers all seemed very relaxed and informal. They did not seem so much about trying to find gaps in your knowledge / wrong answers as they were about pushing you towards the limits of what you knew and then seeing how you dealt with questions that you did not immediately know the answer to.
One of the 5 developer interviews was the bar-raiser, who's purpose at Amazon is ensuring that you're smart and a good fit for Amazon as a company. Many of the questions in this interview were more high level asking about design patterns, and language specifications. While the interview definitely was more difficult than the others, it did not feel overly aggressive or negative.
In addition to the developer interviews, there was lunch with the hiring manager and a 15 minute interview with the recruiter. The lunch was an opportunity to ask more about Amazon and the team. Recruiter interview was to discuss benefits, salary, and total compensation.
After the on site interview, I received a call within 2 days from the recruiter with the initial offer.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Write a function that takes two strings A & B as arguments. Return a boolean that indicates if A is a substring of B. Explain the various test cases you would run on the function.
It started with an OA, and then after a few weeks, I got invited to four rounds of interviews: technical and behavioral at 3 of the 4, and behavioral only at one.
Um teste de código online, se aprovado, vai para o loop. O loop é 4 entrevistas seguidas, duas em inglês e duas em português. 3 entrevistas técnicas de código, todas as 4 têm pergunta de liderança.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pergunta historicas baseada nos principios de lideranca da amazon.
The whole process stretched over nearly a month, longer than I anticipated. After an initial phone screen, I faced a technical round that included a Min Stack implementation question. We discussed design considerations and thread safety, which threw me for a bit. Fortunately, I remembered a specific mock interview I practiced on PracHub that mirrored this scenario closely, making me feel more at ease. Ultimately, I received an offer, but I chose to decline due to the company culture not feeling like the right fit.