Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 48% positive. To compare, the company-average is 57.5% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 24 days to get hired, when considering 3,651 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Amazon overall takes an average of 28 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Amazon as a Software Engineer according to 3,651 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 30%
One on one interview: 18%
Skills test: 17%
Presentation: 10%
Personality test: 7%
Group panel interview: 6%
IQ intelligence test: 5%
Background check: 4%
Other: 2%
Drug test: 2%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied online. The process took 4 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2017
Interview
Several steps.
First someone calls for 15min "what is up" questions. Then they schedule phone screening. Then they rescheduled for Thursday but called me on Wednesday. However, they got timing correct, I was home and quickly walked to my computer to take test.
That was the online phone tech screening.
First a few questions about what you did before in your life. I asked if he wants some specifics instead of whole life story and that helped to not waste our time on staff that is irrelevant at this step.
Next was the problem, it was easy problem, described below. I explain exactly the algorithm as it was stupid easy. The only issue I had was that it is in a text editor and day-to-day work you use some IDE that gives you all functions of each object you use. In particular I needed to sort() and I could not remember if the sort function takes call back, lambda or something else in the language I used for the interview. I was recently working with several different languages and each has different syntax for sort. The interviewer did not like that. The I said that I think it takes lambda function with 2 args and returns true/false. He googled and it was not the case for this language. Oh well, I never met a developer who is not using Google nor StackOverflow every day.
Another thing is that the interviewer was going on silent and when I had a question he probably was somewhere else and did not answer several times..
Finally at the end he asked if I have questions. I actually wanted to learn more about Amazon. However, he answered first 2 questions in short sentences and then pretty much let me know he does not want to talk any more.
Summary: I agree that developers should be tested on algorithm implementation. However, if real IDE is not used then it needs to be in a pseudo language because in nowadays it is pointless to remember all syntax sugar of each language, - IDE does it for you, the same way as we do not code in assembly any more.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Split string by letters and count how many times each letter appear there.
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.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.