Software Developer applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 33% positive. To compare, the company-average is 63.8% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
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I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Sep 2012
Interview
Applied online through as a new Graduate. They called and asked to set up an interview. First interview was lots of questions based on material like what are the 5 Principals of Object Oriented Programming. They ask lots of questions about your former work (if you only have school projects they ask you to talk about what you did). They will then ask you questions about those projects such as what programming designs you used (Singleton for example) and ask what characteristics that design has. The last 15 minutes of the interview is a programming question. My question was to write a method that sorts 2 Array's into one. You write this code quickly and tell them over the phone how you wrote it (including parentheses commas, ect). He asks you clarifying questions like if you wanted this to run faster how might you right it, and assuming we wanted duplicates how would you need to modify the code.
The second interview was much more programming based. 20 minutes was general questions followed by a programming question which was done online on a website where both the interviewer and the interviewee could both see and work on the code. I forget what this code was but its a fairly simple method to write. At the end of the interview I was asked to write a method for StringToDouble in the next hour (following the end of the interview) and then to email it to the interviewer. This method had to include thorough error checking and a method to test various cases (invalid characters, double too large, ect).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Which design patterns did you use in your projects and why?
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2012
Interview
HR contacted me initially and then was sent a link to a site where in I needed to answer 3 programming questions which were pretty straightforward. I also had to answer 100 odd questions which were basically meant to judge my character. I was then called in for an onsite interview where in I had 5 rounds including a lunch round. It was pretty exhausting but over all went OK. By no ways was I expecting an offer as I knew Amazon standards and knew I had performed below it. Expectedly got a reject 2 weeks later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
NDA was signed and hence cannot mention the questions here.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Aug 2009
Interview
Overall an excellent experience. First had a technical phone interview lasting about an hour. Then was flown in for a day of onsite interviews and put up in great accommodations. Interviewers were all friendly, highly technical, and questions were all good and leading to good conversations. At the end of the day had a final debrief from a HR person.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Was asked to design a large distributed system on the spot, despite not having relevant experience. But the interviewer did a great job of setting up the problem and we talked through it and worked out a solution. I enjoyed it.