Sr. Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 100% positive. To compare, the company-average is 58.6% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
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I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2018
Interview
I interviewed with the Devices and MAKO groups. One thing I have to say, Amazon has been working hard to improve the interview experience and it shows. The interview process is greatly improved over what it was several years back when I went through the process.
I was on the "accelerated interview process" because of the amount of experience that I have. So, I first had to complete an online assessment, then an online phone interview, then an onsite interview with 4 engineers.
The Amazon recruiter told me that if I "mess up" with one of the onsite interviewers to not worry, just "shake it off" and go on to the next one. Because only 2 or 3 needed to be good interviews to get hired. I don't think this is true. I believe it was the one that didn't go well that didn't get me the offer.
So, the online assessment went great for me. The phone screen was successful. 3 of the 4 onsite interviews went very well and I felt confident in them.
The one that didn't go so well was the second interview. For one, the interviewer had a very strong Indian accent and I had to ask him to repeat himself frequently. The question he asked should have been simple and straight forward, but what threw me off was his behavior. From early on in the interview, when I would turn around and look at him, he would be dramatically shaking his head as if he was completely disapproving of me from the get go.
I can't tell you if he was pre-judging me over something, if he has a nervous tic, or if the head shaking was supposed to be part of the interview (testing me under pressure, so to speak). So, I'll include the question that I screwed up below.
I know I did well on the other interviews because when they called me to give me the news that they were not giving me an offer, they stressed to me TWICE that there were "many very positive" things about my interview, so they "strongly encourage me to interview again in the future". But they couldn't disclose why they were not giving me an offer.
Gee, thanks. Well, I'm not getting any younger and I'm off to interview with some other large employers in the area.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
So this is the question that I messed up on because the interviewer kept shaking his head throughout the interview which made me nervous and threw me off my game:
We are calling a web service method that will sometimes fail. The problem is to change the client so that if there are 5 failures in less than 10 seconds, the client should stop attempting to make the call to the web method and just return a failure right away.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Vancouver, BC) in Feb 2018
Interview
I applied online. Recruiter contacted me in about a week and then told me to wait till she can find someone to do phone screening.
After 2 weeks o waiting they scheduled screening interview.
Screening took about an hour on a phone in front of computer with shared white board like application in front of me.
One of their engineers called me on a phone and started asking questions. He was speaking with heavy accent and asked too many questions about my past experience which took about 30 minutes. After that he asked me to complete coding question on dynamic programming (longest repeated substring). I have chosen to use algorithm that was correct but required more coding than can be done in 15 minutes, so he asked me to stop and switch to pseudo-code and then he said that I am on right path, he stopped me and then asked OO design question.
In remaining 2-3 minutes interviewer asked me if I have any questions. I asked how did I do? - You failed, but I am not supposed to tell you that. They will email you in few days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Implement a function (you can choose language) that returns longest repeating substring. For example "asdfsaasdf" should return "asdf". I asked question if strings can overlap answer was "yes".
2. Provide OO design for a parking lot.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Sunnyvale, CA) in Feb 2018
Interview
Four people interviewed me,
Every interview had the technical and non-technical questions.
I was asked to describe one of my projtects.
What was a bottleneck in architectrure/design?
How I argue with other team members if there are several possible solutions?
Leadership questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Find the longest sub-string with non-repeated characters.
Find the longest common substring in the set of strings (all strings contains only 0 or 1),
Find all overlapping intervals,