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.
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Sep 2011
Interview
Was cold-called by internal recruiter who was following-up for a tech manager who had seen my online resume. Recruiter strangely was more comfortable with phone than email, so our exchanges took a long time to transpire. My background is User Interface Development, which is all over my resume, so I assumed the position was related given the tech manager's interest, though I didn't expressly hear this from the recruiter.
Eventually we setup a phone interview between a developer and myself, and I was caught off-guard by a series of backend software engineering technical questions. The interviewer was very nice, and we worked through many of the questions together, but I constantly made mention that these were not the sorts of things I deal with in the work I do. The interviewer was decent throughout the process, especially given my bickering about the lack of relevance to my background.
I emailed the recruiter after the interview describing the awkward interview situation. I was surprised to hear back that I passed and was being asked to conduct another technical phone interview. I wrote back stating I would be happy to but only if it was more related to my industry background, which I described in more detail to the recruiter. Oddly, after that I received a curt reply back stating that they no longer wanted to proceed with the interview process. The recruiter just ended it there and did not even try to find me a position or group with a better fit within the company.
In short, the recruiter was not very professional but I felt the developer who interviewed me was.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were in the category of data structures and algorithm --- e.g., searching algorithms, big-O, caching implementations.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2012
Interview
I applied online using the official website. After a week or so, I was contacted by a recruiter that wanted to schedule my first phone interview a specific position in Seattle. I did a second phone interview as well. Both the interviews were technical and about algorithms, complexity, object oriented design and general knowledge. Now I am waiting for the on-site interview in Seattle.
The overall process so far worked fine. I am just slightly disappointed about their HR system, which I personally felt pretty chaotic
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design an object oriented system for a deck of cards
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Amazon in May 2011
Interview
Asked some general questions like describe your most challenging project, Explain REST vs SOAP.
Gave some whiteboard questions like given two strings, write a function that returns the index of the first match of one string within the other.
And Given a set of x elements connected in a circular fashion, remove every nth element until the last one remains.
I solved both but the interviewer didn't like my first solution. Had to convince him to compile and run it to test before he accepted the next day it as correct. Guess we didn't mesh well.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given two strings, write a function that returns the index of the first match of one string within the other