I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2015
Interview
Yes, you read that right.. 180 days. First phone interview, interviewer never bothered to submit feedback to the system. Recruiter would contact and go dark for a month, contact and dark.. Finally another phone interview.
Was told I had to fly to Seattle for the on-site even though I live less than ten miles from the job location. I have to fly in the day before, so it takes me two days to do this interview. Also, I could not get a job description although I was told multiple teams were interested.
After the flight had been booked I finally get a job description and the required skill-set is nowhere near what my resume lists.. I go anyway because I had never been to Seattle, though I started to have my doubts about all of it.
Do the interview and everything goes ok. For dealing with technology so far out of my comfort zone I'd say I did pretty well overall. Lots of algorithm and cloud based questions. Aced a couple, did ok on some and got stuck on one.
Get a call the next day that the team decided to pass because of my lack of knowledge of their technology. Told the recruiter that I thought it was odd that I was brought in for this job in the first place and expected the team to understand that I had to learn on the job.. Get quite rudely told that "we hire on experience, not potential." and she tells me she'll call back in a year or so.
If you only hire on experience, why contact someone who has none of the skills listed that you are looking for? This turned into a giant waste of time for everyone involved because of some recruiter not doing their job.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Lots of algorithm questions straight out of careercup. Overall the interview was quite thorough and all bases were covered. I could not figure out who the 'bar raiser' was because none of the interviews stood out as particularly difficult.
What was interesting was that when I asked questions about cooperation and interaction with different groups, all interviewers replied in a way that i could see there was a lot of friction between departments. Having read the amazon reviews and the dreaded 'stack ranking' system they still employ, it was no real surprise to me.
The technical round focused on a DSA problem about finding the closest points to the origin, where I was asked to explore multiple approaches like sorting, heaps, and quickselect. It felt straightforward, and I was ready for it thanks to the time I spent on PracHub brushing up on similar questions. The interview also included a behavioral section, but overall, I found the process to be very easy. Happy to say I received an offer, which I gladly accepted!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
K Closest Points to Origin - given an array of points on the 2D plane and an integer k, return the k closest points to the origin (0,0). Walk through sort-by-distance O(n log n), heap-based O(n log k), and quickselect O(n) average; discuss when to prefer each based on the relationship between n and k.
Tough interview.
The Process: Automated Online Assessment (OA) with 2 coding questions and a system simulation, followed by a 4-round virtual Loop. Every single round started with 20 minutes of intense, behavioral behavioral questions diving into Amazon's Leadership Principles, followed by 25 minutes of technical coding or system design.
Amazon interviews are a test of mental endurance because you have to switch from deep behavioral storytelling straight into complex coding which can be so difficult. I used Apex Interviewer to practice the cognitive context switch. Running through their live-coding workspace helped me ensure my technical communication and architectural structures remained sharp and automatic, even after spending the first half of the interview defending my past project metrics. I fed the practice AI questions I extracted from glassdoor and gothamloop.
In the end, the offer was way lower than I hoped.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design the backend inventory tracking and placement service for a global fulfillment network, ensuring strict transactional consistency across multiple regional warehouses during peak shopping events.
Initial screening call with recruiter followed by a 1 hr hacker rank question on DSA. The final round was a panel consisting of 4 interviews ranging from technical design, more DSA and behaviour questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe a time when you disagreed with your team and how you resolved it