The process is overall quite painful: have to master the leadership principle and pair them with past experience and brush up your leetcode. Seem disconnected from actual research abilities. Good luck though
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in May 2024
Interview
First, it was a coding test. Leetcode style problem. There were 2 Leetcode medium difficulty problems. In the second step, they asked about deep learning questions most. Asked about how Encoding, Decoding of Transformer work. They wanted me to show how decoding generate output. They also asked about logistic regression, cross-entropy loss. They asked to write equation of these.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Amazon (Santa Clara, CA) in Feb 2026
Interview
I got a referral to the job because of my current collaborarion with Amazon for my dissertartion. I'm currently a 2nd-year Phd student in Computer Science.
The first part is an online assessment (OA) which mainly consisted of Leetcode easy and medium questions and the leadership principle test.
The next phase was the technical interview, where I was interviewed in 2 different sessions, each session with an Applied Scientist for 1 hour. The interview was mainly talking about my research collaboration with Amazon and my previous research works during undergrad.