I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Berlín) in Mar 2020
Interview
Two 1-hour online interviews followed by a virtual full day onsite, all within a month
The onsite interview was done online due to COVID. It included a 45min presentation of my research work followed by 5 1-hour individual interviews.
All interviews included at least 20-30 mins of behavioral questions, many of which were asked multiple times by different interviewers, so make sure to have at least 2-3 examples for each. In terms of technical/research questions they were based around potential use cases for amazon, without taking much into consideration your personal expertise.
In the end I did not get an offer, even though I felt I did well. I was informed through the phone after approximately one week that while I showed great potential in the leadership and behavioral part, I was slightly lacking in the functional (?) part.
Unfortunately doing the onsite virtually rather face-to-face, makes it harder to "read" the room and understand if the interviewer is actually satisfied with your answers or not
Interview questions [7]
Question 1
1st online interview with Applied scientist. Discussion was mainly about my research work along with behavioral questions. I was asked to analyse some of the recent research projects I had on my CV
2nd onsite interview: Technical/Research questions included:
Discussion about employing/improving amazon's image search service (i.e from an instagram fashion post, finding the corresponding product in the amazon catalog)
Included potential techniques for large scale image matching, annotation (bboxes, segmentation masks, hierarchical labels etc.), adding new items to the product list, transferring knowledge between similar domains (i.e instagram vs magazine)
4th onsite interview: Technical question
How would you improve amazon's core services using computer vision techniques. The question actually overlapped with the discussion with the 2nd interviewer, so I had to come up with a different novel idea.
Coding question
For a list of rectangles/subarrays find the average of each one on a 2D Matrix
The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Feb 2020
Interview
Applied Scientist Intern
One informal phone screen about research. Two phone interviews about research and behavior questions. Coding exercises are focus on NLP model and evaluation metrics. Interviewers are super helpful and encouraging, Really nice interview experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
BQ: What did you do when you disagreed with other's ideas?
I applied in-person. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2018
Interview
The potential manager reached out to me first. After an informal call with him checking whether our interests match, I had 2 phone screens with researchers people on that team. In the first one, I was asked machine learning/deep learning theory, with a practical task to program an LSTM cell update; following was the coding round where I programmed a simple search algorithm for navigating in a maze.
In the second screening, we only discussed a specific machine learning problem (apparently the one interviewer was himself working on recently).
At the end, the tasks are of average difficulty (harder on the ML side, easier on the coding side), but the way they assess your work is rather unpredictable.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Why would you regularize a neural network? List all the ways you know how to do it