I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2017
Interview
Interview process was first technical interview, where a very low-experinced employee interviewed me on problem solving and solution thinking for 45 minutes. It included using the interactive whiteboard to discuss problems and do just a little simple coding for partial solutions (the problems were too big to solve in a few minutes in an accurate and tested manner).
The issue I have with this process is that it is NOT a reasonable assessment of a senior candidate's experience and skills. When a 5 years or less 'person' interviews a very successful senior engineer with well over 20 years of real world experience, and then does not recommend further interest in the candidate due to lack of skills, well, something is wrong with the system! People think of solutions in different ways, and working together to collaborate on a best solution is what good engineering is about. A barely-out-of-being-junior engineer cannot come close to understanding what that is like in the world outside of Amazon.
I would not work with such a person, even if they had made an offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Something about searching a string for sequences of characters and counts of them.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon in Mar 2017
Interview
Contacted by a recruiter. Online coding test. Sent my resume. Arranged phone screen with hiring manager. Pretty easy questions but needed preparation. I used brute force but couldn't think of optimization.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding test: one linear algorithm problem, one binary tree problem.
Phone screening: one linear algorithm problem, one OOD problem, one linked list problem.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Amazon (San Jose, CA) in May 2013
Interview
Recruiter emailed me, and after exchanging emails and talked over the phone, I had Phone screening, the interview was too long, the question was too complicated, and the end result, I did not make it for the next stage.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
* Takes a list of strings representing either operators or operands and returns
* the result of a reverse-polish notation calculation on them
* Sample output:
* {"4", "1", "+", "2", "*"} -> ((4 + 1) * 2) -> 10
* {"5", "8", "4", "/", "+"} -> (5 + (8 / 4)) -> 7
* Supported operators are +, -, *, and /
* @param ops the series of operators and operands to operate on
* @return a Double equal to the result of the calculation
* @throws IllegalArgumentException if ops does not represent a well-formed RPN expression
* @throws ArithmeticException if the expression generates an arithmetic error, such as dividing by zero
*/