I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Los Angeles, CA) in Feb 2013
Interview
I was contacted by an Amazon recruiter via LinkedIn. I interviewed with them previously (unsuccessfully) and looks like they had me in their database.
The recruiter told me that they have a hiring event in LA and if I am interested, I can try. Of course I was interested. I have been obsessed with this job for a very long time. I failed once, but I learned a lot since. I decided to give it a try.
The event was in three days. Sure, I read up on some algorithms, but there is not much one can do in this kind of time. What I knew would have to be enough for success or failure.
They interviewed people in the hotel in LA. You get a separate room, and interviewers walk in, and each one of them gets about 45-50 minutes with you. They ask some theoretical questions (for example, design some classes for a chat system) and some whiteboard coding.
As to the coding, there was a lot of recursion and binary trees. There was nothing extremely hard or undoable, no NP-hard problems I was afraid of. I had 4 technical interviews and one talk with the recruiter. The interviewers were great - friendly and pleasant.
I got through without glaring errors or missed questions. But I feared that I was not brilliant enough for them. I was right.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
It was hard to answer behavioral / situation questions. I am very bad at selling myself. It is probably good to practice these:
Describe a simple but great idea that you have successfully implemented.
Describe what you would improve in your current team.
Describe the biggest challenge that you faced in your work.
Describe the situation when your team could not make a deadline and how you handled it.
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.