I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2011
Interview
I'm a master's student in computer science and my advisor approached me about a possible opportunity with Amazon. One of her former students now works for the company and had told her they were looking for software developers. I submitted my resume via email and was scheduled for a phone interview within the week. A few hours before the interview I received an email stating they needed to postpone it until the next week.
I finally received the call after 7 days of waiting and proceeded with the phone screening. The interview was being conducted by one of their developers, so the expectation of technical knowledge was high. He was courteous and friendly but immediately got down to business with the first questions. The interview consisted of a few short-answer questions and several more open-ended problems dealing with algorithms and software design. The questions were fair and not overly difficult, and the interviewer offered a few hints and nudges in the right direction when I got stuck on something.
I've heard from others that there is something of an "Amazon culture" of cockiness and a general attitude of being the best at what they do (which certainly may be well deserved judging by the size and success of the company). I did get something of a sense of this when I was asking my questions at the end of the interview--when I asked the developer what his favorite part about working at Amazon was, he immediately replied that it was the confidence that he could solve virtually any problem posed to him, no matter how large. Again, he was polite and helpful through the entire call, but he wasn't much for smalltalk or joking around. From word of mouth and my conversation with this developer it seems like a pretty serious work environment.
Write an algorithm to output every possible string that can generated by a given 10-digit telephone number. (You know, how when you look at your phone's keypad the number 2 corresponds to A, B, or C, the number 9 corresponds to W, X, Y, or Z, etc.)
Interview by recuriter, Phone interview over Chime with one easy Leet code problem and 2 behavioral questions. Although the interviewer was very casual at the start of the conversation, it quickly changed into behavioral questions at the start.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Encoding optimization algorithm and talk about a project you did recently.
First round is just leet code coding which screens through AI before going into live coding. Pretty simple and straighforward. Not too tough. Recruiter walks through it pretty nicely. Not sure how many rounds there are exactly
After submitting my application for the Software Engineer position, I received an invitation to complete an automated Online Assessment (OA). The assessment consisted of standard coding challenges, primarily focusing on algorithmic and data structure problems. Unfortunately, a few days after submitting my solutions for the assessment, I received an email informing me that I would not be moving forward in the interview process and was rejected.