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 3,654 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 3,654 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 through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2015
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter on Linkedin. I was given a timed coding exercise to complete on a website. After that I was invited to a recruitment event organized in Europe. The face to face interviews were nice. In the beginning me and other guys sitting in a hotel room were told that there would be 3 interviews for each person but if there was need they could invite some people for the 4th one too(and I was).
During for interviews the format was more or less the same. I had to answer questions about my background, some technical problems and coding on whiteboard.
The thing that bothered me throughout the whole interview process was that there was no clear description of what I was supposed to work on. I didn't have much to say about what I wanted to work on and they decided on my behalf for what role I fitted best(it was something I had absolutely no interest nor previous experience) and which location(not the location I wanted in the first place).
Overall it was a positive experience, talking to smart people in the interviews and solving interesting questions. But for the reasons I explained I ended up declining their offer.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write a method that returns true if the two given strings were anagrams.
You are given a stream of characters and a list of valid tokens. Write a method that returns true if the character stream only consists of valid tokes. (Note: number of valid tokens is very big)
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.
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?
The interview process was straightforward with no surprises — three coding rounds (LeetCode medium difficulty), a system design round, and a cultural fit conversation. The interviewers were pleasant and the overall atmosphere was positive.
That said, it's worth noting that this format feels dated. Even before the rise of AI, LeetCode-style assessments were a questionable proxy for real-world engineering ability and cultural fit. In today's environment, where AI can solve most of these problems instantly, continuing to use this framework raises the question of what signal it's actually measuring.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
For coding it was ask very similar to number of islands (2D grid search) with a twist.