I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Apr 2012
Interview
Applied online. HR Manager contacted for a telephonic interview.
1. First telephonic interview consisted of mainly questions on why you want to shift from existing firm to amazon and were looking for fit. Few case questions on transportation, operational metrics and shipments scheduling. Lasted for around 45-50 mins and after that HR called to confirm for another telephonic interview.
2. Second telephonic interview was with a lady fresh out of college and had been working just for over a month with them. She was inexperienced with interviewing and kept on asking why amazon and why you want to leave you present job - for more than 30 mins and kept on badgering on same point again and again. I don't know when did leaving a job and changing profile became such an issue. Then she asked couple of case questions on logistics and package scheduling. She herself wasnt sure what to ask and kept on babbling majority of time.
No reply and when contacted HR for update their standard negative reply arrived. Its a good idea to have discussion with your would-be peers but juveniles shouldnt be given opportunity to decide someone's career prospects.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Hyderabad) in Jan 2012
Interview
Recruiter made a couple of calls prior to confirm my availability for the interview, When I arrived at the site, I am impressed by their hospitality.
I was asked to take up a written test which lasted for about 2 hours. When its complete, They gave me the feedback within 10 minutes.
The second round of interview was 1:1 with another analyst on couple of business reporting scenarios (SQL). After its done, I got a break of 1 Hour for lunch
The third round of interview was 1:1 with another analyst on couple of data loading strategies. Looks like this guy got a little bit of ego
The fourth round was 1:1 with the manager, evaluating my attitude and couple of questions on SDLC and project architectures. Later after that, I was asked to leave for the day & wait for the feedback.
After 1 week I got the reply saying
We hope you are doing fine! It was really wonderful to talk with you recently and we appreciate the time you spent with Amazon.
Unfortunately, we are unable to take your candidature further, at the moment. However, your credentials are extremely impressive and we wish to retain your details on our active database. We shall get back to you as soon as another similar opportunity opens up.
We wish you luck in your future endeavors and thank you once again for your interest in Amazon.com
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Write a SQL to explode the data from orders table based on quantity ordered for each product
Ex: A product book if ordered with quantity 3, Then i should get the output as 3 rows with each record having quantity 1.
How do you recover a failed insert statement which is loading millions of records into a table containing billions of records.
Hint: oracle partitioning
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2012
Interview
They are very responsive to online applications. I didn't expect a huge company like this to call me back pretty soon after my application. And the system is good, the HR could pull out the schedule of the interviewer directly without asking around and schedule the time for the interview. However the interviewer didn't seem to care about what I was saying, distracted all the time. Questions asked were like a format that applies to everyone, not specifically for the position. And he was a bit rude.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What do you think is different when you have huge data set?