I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2014
Interview
For college students, an on-site group interview is likely, without any phone interviews.
I was contacted a few days after submitting an online application and resume, for an on-site interview later that month. All the interviewees were college students, both undergraduate and graduate.
Due to non-disclosure I cannot discuss questions, but it is already known that these group interviews split candidates into groups of 3, and allow them to each work on a portion of a problem. You are given a laptop, and a choice of languages, and several hours (roughly from 9:30am to 4:30pm) to provide the code for the solution.
During that time there were several interviewers who took us aside to ask us how we were solving the problem, first as a group, then as individuals. This part was closer to a standard interview: discuss the problem, things you fix, things you fail to fix, further work.
There was a tour in the morning, and a Q&A with employees at the end of the day.
Received an offer a few days later. Had 2 weeks to decide. Was given a choice of groups within the company to join.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Non-disclosure Agreement covers these questions.
Recommendation: fully outline your plan in comments before writing code. If you do not finish, or your code does not work correctly, there will be a record of what you intended.
Standard review of algorithms and data structures is good, but also practice writing, running, and testing code.
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.
Recruiter reaches out after applying through Amazon careers, no referral. Had an initial OA, then after a month had four rounds in two days - three coding one system design. Each round had 30 min behavioral and 30 min coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were mainly hashmap, sliding window and interval related.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.