I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Dec 2016
Interview
TL;DR: The interview process at Amazon is broken. Amazon favors those who are experts at interviewing and show aptitude for solving puzzle problems under pressure, on a white board and in an academic way under time constraints. The interview is structured in a way that completely obfuscates and diminishes real-world, pragmatic experience acquired over the years of writing software and focuses on how well you payed attention in class. It's a kin to a trauma surgeon with 15 years of battlefield experience being judged solely on how well he or she can suture a small cut on a pinky finger.
The interview process started with a recruiter organizing a technical phone screen with a simple coding question much like every other company. The phone screen was easily passed and did not present much of a challenge.
The next step was to interview all day on site with several individuals some of which were by remote video conference. Many of interviewers were from teams other than the team I was interviewing for and it was evident by their demeanor. They seemed to have been required to perform the interview and did not seem overly interested in the outcome. The words "robotic" and "forced" comes to mind when describing the interviewers.
On a side note, you can easily infer the outcome of the interview by taking note of the recruiters attentiveness to you before and after the interview. In my case, the recruiter was responsive to my inquires and questions, answered the phone and went out of her way to be available to me before the interview. After the interview had taken place, she was unavailable and would not return calls as promptly thus indicating a negative outcome. If there is a rejection, you are dead wood to the recruiter who does not wish to waste precious time with you anymore.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Expect puzzle questions, some of which are found online. Amazon interviewers lack the brilliance to come up with anything unique or representative of real-world applications. Amazon! The 1990's called; they want their soft skill questions back!
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Santa Monica, CA) in Oct 2016
Interview
Applied online, contacted by a callback from recruiter. The recruiter described the rolle and went over my background, skills and interests. Then I was offered a timed coding challenge from HackerRank.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a video library hierarchy of movie titles with a specified weight of ratings at each node, write a recommendation function traversing the hierarchy and building up recommendation collection based on the rating pattern.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Ottawa, ON) in Nov 2016
Interview
Screening was done online by solving a coding problem within 2 hours. If you are successful at that then you will be contacted by a recruiter for a quick telephone interview. You will then be invited to a half day interview where you will be interviewed by four individuals. All of the interviews will be technical in nature and you will have to write code showing how you will solve the problem proposed to you by the interviewer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you determine if a person is a friend of another person on a social networking application?