I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Aug 2012
Interview
I went though two telephone screens/interviews before being flown to Seattle for a day of interviews on site. The telephone interviews were typical computer science interview questions - mostly around data structures and file systems.
The on site interview was 5 part with 5 different people for about an hour a piece starting at 11am and going through the afternoon. Multiple interviewers were former Microsoft employees and spent a significant amount of time talking about what they left behind at Microsoft. One interviewer was very confrontational.
I followed through with the day but a couple of hours in I decided I had no desire to work for Amazon.
Recruiter screen, followed by an online coding assessment and then a technical phone interview. The final round was a virtual onsite loop with multiple interviews covering data structures, system design, debugging, and Amazon Leadership Principles. The technical questions were practical but time-constrained, and the behavioural questions required specific examples using the STAR format.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a scalable URL shortening service and explain how you would handle high read traffic, collisions, database schema, expiration, and basic monitoring.
That moment when the interviewer asked about finding indices in an array for a target sum was wild — I had just tackled something identical while prepping on PracHub. The interview included a technical round with another question about designing an in-memory LRU cache and a behavioral question about meeting tight deadlines. After a smooth discussion, I was told I'd received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, the process felt pretty straightforward and not overly challenging.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of integers return the indices of two numbers summing to a target
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.