I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2012
Interview
I applied through Amazon's website. I was contacted by a recruiter not too long after (< 2 weeks) to set up the first of two phone screens. There was about a week in between the two phone interviews, and after the second there was about another week before I got contacted to arrange the trip out to Seattle for the on-site.
The phone interviews were very standard SE interviews. We used an online text editor for coding questions, and there were also higher-level design and algorithm questions.
The on-site consisted of four technical interviewers with engineers on the team I was being interviewed for (Kindle) and a lunch with a manager of the same team. They asked more personal questions during the on-site than is typical (from my experience), but each interview focused around one technical problem to solve on the whiteboard. The lunch was also an interview with the interviewer asking so many questions I didn't get to finish my food, actually.
I wasn't too confident with my solutions (I was being sloppy and tripping over syntax), but I was contacted during my trip home from Seattle to extend an offer. I had an offer from my #1 choice though, so I ended up declining. The impression I got from the engineers I talked to is that you can get worked very hard at Amazon, and while the engineers would say that the policies were fair (since if you were working long hours you were working to fix your mistakes), when I pressed the issue they seemed to waffle a bit on it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing too crazy. Standard data structures / algorithms / design type questions.
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.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.