I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2012
Interview
I first passed two phone interviews, with standard algorithm and design questions, similar to ones posted on GlassDoor. I was flown to Seattle for interviews. The hotel was nice, but breakfast was not included. I interviewed with 9 people, some 1:1, but most 2:1, and one 3:1. Most interview questions can be found on GlassDoor, or are very similar. The final interview was with the "bar raiser", which I basically failed. I also had a hard time with an algorithm efficiency question since the interviewer misunderstood my code. In general, the people were smart and nice. Questions were pretty much the same as posted on this site. The bar raiser asked questions requiring familiarity with implementation of Reliability and Durability within a distributed messaging system architecture. I was surprised to learn that Amazon developers are periodically on call, and even more surprised to learn they can expect to be called when they are! I would say the interview questions were more difficult than average, but it is hard to maintain high energy and mental agility through so many interviews, so I rate the process Very Difficult.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you find if a list of strings, at least one is a prefix of another?
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2011
Interview
It took 2 weeks to schedule the interview. There was 1 phone interview which was easy. Interviewer was friendly.
Was asked about basics of object oriented concepts, some data structure concepts and a couple of programming questions. They seem to concentrate on Data structures and object oriented concepts.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Pékin, Pékin) in Sep 2011
Interview
Mostly focus on projects I worked on and working process/style. After that, two data structure problems need to be solved.
1. Find circle in link list
2. Get Rand(7) from Rand(5)