I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Winnipeg, MB) in Mar 2018
Interview
This was an almost entire day technical interview. This was not in Seattle or Vancouver, so a few interviews were remote, but still I had to write solutions on a white board.
This was not very different from what is described in the Cracking the Code Interview book. Lots of focus on Big O notation and scalability. I had a couple interviews in the morning, then one of the guys took me out for lunch and three more in the afternoon. Data structure and Big O notation are the big focus, while you design solutions on paper, white board, or plain text editor. Each interviewer has a different preference. Lots of behavioural questions, but also the expected things. Basically they ask you about the most challenging situations and how you handled them, like when your vote on a solution was overruled, or when you had to throw away a lot of code and start from scratch again.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about a time you thought you had a better solution but you had to implement it differently.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
The process started with a brief 30-minute phone screening with a recruiter, focusing on my background and resume.
After that, I was invite to a technical video interview with a senior engineer. This round lasted about 60 minutes, starting with a brief introduction, followed by a live coding challenge on a shared editor, and ended with a few questions about system design basics and my past projects.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement a function to find the first non-repeating character in a string and discuss its time and space complexity.
total 5 rounds - First OA assessment, quick telephone interview with recruiter, followed by 4 back to back technical and behavioral rounds. In technical round question were around topological graph sorting, cycle detection in linked list, and LRU cache. In behavioral round, the question were based on their 16 principles.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you manage the disagreement at your workplace.
I got a take home exam on HackerRank that I did not do great in. I did not perfectly solve every problem. Then it was another problem with "AI assistance" except the AI seemed programmed to be as useless as possible, it's genuinely better to just not use it. Somehow I got the next interview anyways, who also asked me some leetcode style questions and asked my to explain my experience and then next day they rejected me.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is the most complex problem I have encountered?
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 3,658 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 3,658 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%
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