I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2012
Interview
My resume was found by recruiter from Seattle that applied on my behalf to Amazon.com. Initially everything went pretty smoothly. First interview was phone interview conducted by non-technical person who had a list of questions and wrote my answers. After that they send me coding assignment that I had to finish in 24 hours. This "skills test" consisted of 8 different assignments that required writing the actual code. Some assignments were small and easy and some pretty big and complicated. All in all it was pretty difficult to finish them in 24 hours especially for working person. After they reviewed code of assignments I have been invited to interview event in Toronto. They just "forgot" to mention that interview will take place at 25th floor and that was deal breaker for me. So as a result I didn't show up for in-person interview and got "no-offer".
Interview by recuriter, Phone interview over Chime with one easy Leet code problem and 2 behavioral questions. Although the interviewer was very casual at the start of the conversation, it quickly changed into behavioral questions at the start.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Encoding optimization algorithm and talk about a project you did recently.
First round is just leet code coding which screens through AI before going into live coding. Pretty simple and straighforward. Not too tough. Recruiter walks through it pretty nicely. Not sure how many rounds there are exactly
After submitting my application for the Software Engineer position, I received an invitation to complete an automated Online Assessment (OA). The assessment consisted of standard coding challenges, primarily focusing on algorithmic and data structure problems. Unfortunately, a few days after submitting my solutions for the assessment, I received an email informing me that I would not be moving forward in the interview process and was rejected.