The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Aug 2011
Interview
Interview process was standard. Had 4, 1 on 1 on-site interviews. Thought I did fairly well but according to sources you have to ace their hardest question (they have a name for it but I don't remember it now). I stumbled on one of the harder questions but thought I did well overall.
Hard question: Given a game where you start with a word (for example, "TAGS"), find an algorithm that will give you the shortest number of intermediary words to get to a final word (for example, "LAYS"). So in the example above, a possible sequence would be, TAGS, SAGS, SASS, LASS, LAYS.
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.