Between August and November 2024, I went through five interview stages with this company. For almost every step, I had to follow up multiple times — calling or emailing — because their HR consistently forgot to get back to me. It was always on me to remind them and push things forward. Eventually, I was invited to work on their final take-home project. I spent two full weeks preparing for it and traveled to their Berlin office to present it in person. The presentation went really well, and I received very positive feedback. After three months of waiting, I started to get signals that the outcome would likely be positive. They told me I’d just need to wait one more week for the final decision. Instead, two to three weeks later, they gave me a quick call to say I had been rejected. The rejection itself is their right — no complaints there. But the real issue is how terribly they managed the entire process. For 3–4 months, the only reason things progressed was because I kept chasing them. Despite my strong performance, they dragged the process out, communicated poorly, and showed a shocking lack of organization. For a company of this size, such a messy and careless recruitment process is unacceptable. It was honestly exhausting and felt unfair to the candidates going through it.

Typical of Amazon, the hiring process is structured in 3 phases: an initial HR call, a 1-hour coding test, followed by four 1-hour interviews focusing on both coding skills and system design expertise.

I had three rounds of interviews. All of the interviews went well, and I was initially told that I was selected for the Software Engineer role. However, the recruiter later contacted me to say that they were reconsidering their offer and would only be able to offer me the Software Engineer role. I asked about the compensation difference, but the recruiter said that the hiring manager was on vacation and would get back to me. After a week, I followed up again, but the recruiter said that they were no longer hiring for the Software Engineer role and were only interested in hiring Senior Software Engineers. I was disappointed by this turn of events, as I had been excited about the opportunity. I have a recording of the conversation with the recruiter I would not recommend interviewing with this company, as they seem to be disorganized and not very reliable. I hope this helps!