Amazon Engineering Manager interview questions

4 design interviews. Each person asked LP questions. Overall nice people. Interviews were random. People kept asking same LP questions again and again. Some remote interviews. Hard to gauge body language. Bar raiser concept is nice. But very badly applied.

I was called on-site, in the London Amazon Video office, after a video interview done a few months before. The on-site consisted in 6 1-hour sessions focused on discussing prior experience matching Amazon culture value + 1 system design interview. I have plenty of experience with hiring, including leading pipelines at AAAs tech companies, and i can tell the process showcased several issues. Still it was informing, since after the day I could figure out this was not the team i was looking to work with. --- What's Good --- * They fly you in, pay for expenses, take care of logistics * They call you in advance to explain the interview format. * The material shared before the interview was pretty solid and comprehensive * Recruiting coordinator is available to help --- What's Bad --- * All is very very impersonal. One interview with an HR person was borderline rude. The interviewer jumping from topic to topic in a very erratic way, asking questions like "now let's talk about X...can you describe me when you did Y ?". When i made a point that the question may not have been clear the person abruptly says "no it was totally clear". Obviously they don't consider being wrong an actual possibility. * Each interview is a mechanical set of questions the same team is visibly skeptical with. And for good reasons: each session objective seems to be to "tick" all checkboxes of the form they had little to zero involvement in creating. But at the end of 1 hour they seem to barely remember your name. And at the end, massive areas of impact for a manger (like mentoring and coaching) are completely un-touched. They don't seem to care if you managed to develop people, and teams. * They almost never look you in the eyes. 2 people in the room in each interview, both furiously typing at their laptop. But they seem more to be *transcripting* the interview rather then really following: multiple time i had to repeat again since they were not fully keeping up. I wonder why they call you on-site to begin with. * There is 1 hour break, but out of 10 people you interview with *nobody* cares to spend the time over lunch with the candidate. Instead you are told "off you go, see you in 1 hour". Not a problem for me to fetch lunch of course, but quite shocking that a team would not use this opportunity to know better the candidate and create the chance to talk about what you do, what they do etc.. * There is a clear mis-match between the values they advertise and the way they seem to operate. I am talking about Amazon Video in particular here. "Customer Obsession" ? "Innovation?" Maybe, but in years they have not cared to tackle a massive and growing amount of tech debt that drags the user experience down. Some interviews are honest and vocal about it, and they don't seem to have faith that the situation will improve. * The team does not take the trouble to provide ANY feedback on the outcome. Being a good citizen? Look elsewhere. Seek for feedback to improve themselves ? Nope. * The team barely leaves time for questions to the candidate. They don't seem to be very concerned about it. * In general, does not really look like an happy place. Nobody smiles. The whole place looks like an hospital (which i am ok with, i buy in with frugality), but they put a ping-pong next to the reception (are employees supposed to play there?), I guess to present the look of a fun-tech-company. If you believe in frugality then perfect, but then be consistent.