I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA)
Interview
Applied online and got a email from recruiter after around 3 weeks. Scheduled a interview after 4 days.
There were 2 back to back phone interviews. Both the interviewers were very friendly. They initially asked questions on my background and asked to explain any of my project. Then they started asking technical questions along with algorithms/data structure. I had to explain the logic and after that I had to speak out the code explaining what I am doing. They always asked my to optimize the code to reduce time/space complexity. Overall I could answer all the questions they asked.
A design question based on a real time customer scenario on Amazon website. Was asked to design the system as efficiently as possible. It included many structures inside other data structures which made the design very complex.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Chicago, IL) in Dec 2011
Interview
Applied online in November 2011, got a call a month later. Had 2 phone interviews 2 weeks later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are given a string with billions of characters spread across many geographically separate machines. Devise a distributed algorithm to find the first non-repeating character in this large string.
I applied through college or university. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Mar 2012
Interview
Applied through the college recruiting for Amzn. Had two rounds of interview. The first interviewer focused on design pattern questions- why this specific design over the other design pattern for this particular question. The second interviewer asked me questions on the projects, asked a few questions on hashtables, Array manipulations. This was basically a problem solving and algorithms round- asked me a variation of knapsack problem.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Apparently the interviewer had also done a similar kind of a project at school so he started digging deep into the project. This was a search engine project. He asked me about page rank etc.