I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2017
Interview
Applied via LinkedIn. Was given a coding challenge at HackerRank, which was moderate, but practical.
Eventually was invited to on-site interview in Seattle, where I had all day long interview.
I was under strong impression everything went well. Just one thing was suspicious - all interviewers were young, and when I asked about average team age - they mentioned a number below 30. Taking into account they work 10+ hours a day, they definitely don't want to consider family guys of age around 40. That's my best guess. Worth to mention I was watching for people coming in and out and they were pretty young too, that is also why my guess can be right. Obviously I did not feel as I'm a good fit for them because of that.
Having previous successful interview experiences with other companies like Microsoft, I can imagine these guys are looking for young slaves. Given that they don't pay above the market, I see no reasons to go there unless you don't want to loose your family or you are a single work-addicted person.
To contrast - Microsoft and Facebook interviews were fair, practical and they are giving some details on where you failed (if you failed). These guys would never tell you the truth.
The office building.. was simply dirty. Maybe I used to work with in much cleaner spaces in Europe, but other offices in the US are much nicer.
What was good about this experience? - they paid for the trip to Seattle. Appreciated that.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
NDA.. but I can say this: the books like Cracking Coding Interviews are useless there, but solving problems with HackerRank would make some sense.
The coding challenges were not difficult at all. Basic data structures and clean coding on the board is all you need to master.
And you definitely cannot prepare to all those behavioral questions as well as design and estimate questions.
Be genuine.
Recruiter screen, followed by an online coding assessment and then a technical phone interview. The final round was a virtual onsite loop with multiple interviews covering data structures, system design, debugging, and Amazon Leadership Principles. The technical questions were practical but time-constrained, and the behavioural questions required specific examples using the STAR format.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a scalable URL shortening service and explain how you would handle high read traffic, collisions, database schema, expiration, and basic monitoring.
That moment when the interviewer asked about finding indices in an array for a target sum was wild — I had just tackled something identical while prepping on PracHub. The interview included a technical round with another question about designing an in-memory LRU cache and a behavioral question about meeting tight deadlines. After a smooth discussion, I was told I'd received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, the process felt pretty straightforward and not overly challenging.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of integers return the indices of two numbers summing to a target
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.