I applied through college or university. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon Lab126 (Los Angeles, CA) in Feb 2013
Interview
Two interviews (behavioral and analytical), a series of questions. Basically, they want to know whether you're capable of being leader - this is key for every employee at Lab126. I talked mostly about my research, shared my passions about my education and work, showed my competence, but also kept it relaxed and conversational.
It was a good interview; I actually enjoyed it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The most difficult questions I received pertained to whether I understood the work which I was describing. So, I talked about some of the research which I worked with in my undergraduate career - My interviewer asked some questions regarding whether these aspects were comerciallizable, how they might progress into the future, etc.
I don't remember any of the particular questions because they didn't come at my with the crazy riddles that everyone is afraid of. The questions were straight forward, but pointed, and I had the sense that the "feel" of my delivery and confidence were as important as the answers themselves.
Very professional and friendly. asked Multiple Hardware Design, circuit diagram. 2 behavioral interviews. Enjoyed the interview process. Recruiter was very responsive and got back to me a few days after the interview.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon Lab126 (Sunnyvale, CA)
Interview
A phone interview and then two weeks later an onsite interview.
The onsite interview was from 9 am to 3pm.
I was sitting in a tiny room. The first interview was with the HR and then a back to back interview with five engineer/managers around one hour each interview.
My background experience is from a small company were one engineer is responsible for the design of extremely complex military boards sometimes more than 20 layers.
I got the impression that my interviewers were not extremely experienced. It seems that they used to design simple boards; maximum 4 layers boards, in a large team of engineers that each doing a small part of the design.
They were asking me some technical question that they were not so familiar with.
One of the interviewers asked me to design for him an A/D circuit on the white board.
I sketched a Successive Approximation A/D Converter and tried to explain to him how it works.
He had hard time to understand how it works.
The last interview is the most important to the decision of acceptance. A young guy reads from the paper 20-25 questions. These questions are meant to determine if the candidate has the character to work at Amazon.
After 6 hours of interview I was tried and kind of neglected this part.
I think some of the questions were repeated to see if my answers are consistent.
The questions went like this:
Interviewer: “Did your manager ever ask you to do something that you thought that it will harm the company?”
Me (I can’t remember something like this in half a minutes, but I have to lie) : “Yes”.
Interviewer: “Can you give me an example”
Me (I have to lie again): “a year ago my manager asked me to blah blah blah” and I arranged a meeting between him and the department manager and blah blah blah ……….and there was a happy end” .
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Did you work on a project and realized that you are falling behind Schedule?
Give me an example that happened to you and did how you respond.
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Amazon Lab126 in Oct 2016
Interview
Applied online through campus job board. Had an on campus day of interviewing for full time. It was 4 45 mins interviews. The first interviewer was cool. He was super casual and we ended up having a longer than 45 minute interview. Other interviews were the correct length but slightly late starting due to backed up interviews.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pick an IOT system you've seen on the market. Tell me how you'd design a clone of it?
Hardware Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon Lab126 with 2.8 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 56% positive. To compare, the company-average is 46.1% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Hardware Engineer roles take an average of 9 days to get hired, when considering 11 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Amazon Lab126 overall takes an average of 22 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Amazon Lab126 as a Hardware Engineer according to 11 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 30%
One on one interview: 30%
Background check: 10%
Group panel interview: 10%
Presentation: 10%
Personality test: 5%
Skills test: 5%
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