I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Roma) in Jul 2017
Interview
I was contacted via Linkedin by a recruiter and then did a phone interview with an interviewer from Seattle.
The experience has been positive, the interviewer was really nice and the interview seemed a sort of brain storming.
I am still waiting for an answer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There was a
1- a review of my past experience
2- the description of a difficult applied problem I was involved in
3- case study
4- a coding question (find the two highest numbers in a sequence)
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in May 2017
Interview
Not organized at all. Took me a month to schedule one interview. At the end, the recruiter has been changed as she could not answer most of my questions and was not fluent on her work. Thus, overall "cannot be worse" experience!
1st interview: regular interview with a team manager
2nd interview: coding interview (stubborn interviewer. forced me to follow everything as he wanted.)
3rd interview: technical interview (good experience. Asked machine learning, statistics problem, and probability questions.)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Do you have any experience about machine learning other than your research field? What is the probability of blah-blah...? Write a code to switch a k-th element with (N-k)-th element in a linked list of length N.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in May 2017
Interview
I was contacted by a technical recruiter to go through another round of interviews for the Applied Scientist position after completing interviews for the Software Development Engineer position.
The whole process was completed within a month. Since I have already been through a round of interviews for the Software Development Engineer position, I only had two interviews - a phone interview with a researcher (not from the same hiring team) and on-site interviews with three interviewers - hiring manager and two other researchers (not from the same hiring team).
All interviews started on-time and lasted 45 minutes. The interviewers were very attentive and engaged during the discussions.
After the on-site interview, I was contacted by the technical recruiter about the hiring team's decision within 2 days, and was sent the actual offer within a week. Before accepting the offer, the recruiting team helped to organized a couple of calls with the hiring manager and another person on the team to allow me to ask questions. I found this helpful in making an informed decision.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Since I signed an NDA, I am not able to give much details here. But in general, besides cultural-fit questions based on Amazon's leadership principles, I was asked three types of technical questions - a general workflow optimization problem, a specific problem faced by a researcher at Amazon, and technical questions on my research. For broad problem statements, it helps to start by listing out the possible directions the problem could go and interactively narrow down the requirements into a specific area of interest.