I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Dec 2012
Interview
I applied through a friend (which you should totally do if it's an option).
I had 2 phone interviews which were pretty basic for the most part. One was dynamic programming and the second question just had to do with designing a DB. The second interview required no code. It was just a little bit of pseudo code and some OO questions. The main problem was keeping calm but if you practice problems a lot you should be able to get past these fairly easily.
Then I was flown out to Seattle for several in-person interviews. I got an HR interview, 2 technical interviews (roughly the same difficulty of before but I was even more nervous), a lunch interview with the manager. I advise getting something easy to chew because you'll be talking the entire time. It can be very awkward if you're not prepared (which I really wasn't). Then I had 2 more technical interviews which I found to be easier because I was getting better feedback.
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.