I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2011
Interview
I had three phone interviews from different engineers. The first part of the interview consisted in questions about my past projects. These questions are quite open and aim to know not only the technical part, but also the work approach, the issues with other collaborators and partners.
The second part of the interviews was technical, with algorithmic problems or design and implementation problems (C++ in my case). Finally, some more minutes were allocated for questions.
For the feedback I had to wait just three days for the first and second interview, while for the third (negative) I had to wait 10 days.
Interviewers are very nice and let you talk a lot. If you are in trouble with a problem they try to give you some hints. I actually almost panicked during the second interview because I was feeling that my design was not good enough. The interviewer wisely let me think through and I even passed that interview step.
I was told that people don't follow any dress code and that the environment is very challenging.
As an engineer you are responsible for the design and implementation and everything is up to you. This means that besides the people that talk with the clients, you (and your team) will be the only responsible for that product.
Also, I was given only a vague answer to my question about the work organization (single/multi task, team size, number of meetings per week, etc) because the engineer said that they are part of the company strategy.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Write a function that allows to convert a string to the corresponding number (i.e. implement the atoi() C function)
Given a (potentially large) array of integers, all but one repeating an even number of times, how would you find the one repeating an odd number of times in an efficient way?
eg [1 2 3 3 2 2 1 4 2] should return 4
Write a C/C++ function to decode url’s string in place. The special characters to handle are:
"%20" -> " "
"%3A” -> "?"
"%3F" -> ":"
Example input: “web.com/kitten%20pic.jpg”
Expected output: “web.com/kitten pic.jpg”
How would you design a system for the generation of book indexes (i.e., you want to generate at the end of the book, a section where the words are indexed with the pages where they can be found)
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.
Recruiter reaches out after applying through Amazon careers, no referral. Had an initial OA, then after a month had four rounds in two days - three coding one system design. Each round had 30 min behavioral and 30 min coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were mainly hashmap, sliding window and interval related.