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. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA)
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter via my LinkedIn profile. He requested a resume, and then within a day asked to schedule a phone screen. The phone screen was a little choppy because they were using a new tool similar to codepen that allowed your code to be evaluated while on the call.
The review was pleasant enough, and--in spite of not being prepared for the low-level java implementation questions--I made it to an on-site.
The on-site is where my experience diverged from expectation. Having heard that you are interviewed for multiple roles by a range of people, I was fully prepared and excited for that. I my case, there was only one role, and all but one of the interviewers were from that team. Since none of them were senior engineers, they had a hard time engaging my questions and thought processes, which made the conversations rather awkward and stifling.
By the time I met with the engineers from a different team, I was a bit off balance, and felt like I didn't shine.
The last interview was with the person who would have supervised me, and we both expressed that it didn't seem like a fit right now.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (San Francisco, CA) in Feb 2016
Interview
Had a phone screening. Then went for a face to face interview. This position was primarily for the Java development. They treated me very well. There were five rounds of the technical interviews on the same day.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2017
Interview
Interview process was first technical interview, where a very low-experinced employee interviewed me on problem solving and solution thinking for 45 minutes. It included using the interactive whiteboard to discuss problems and do just a little simple coding for partial solutions (the problems were too big to solve in a few minutes in an accurate and tested manner).
The issue I have with this process is that it is NOT a reasonable assessment of a senior candidate's experience and skills. When a 5 years or less 'person' interviews a very successful senior engineer with well over 20 years of real world experience, and then does not recommend further interest in the candidate due to lack of skills, well, something is wrong with the system! People think of solutions in different ways, and working together to collaborate on a best solution is what good engineering is about. A barely-out-of-being-junior engineer cannot come close to understanding what that is like in the world outside of Amazon.
I would not work with such a person, even if they had made an offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Something about searching a string for sequences of characters and counts of them.