I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Chicago, IL) in Dec 2011
Interview
Applied online in November 2011, got a call a month later. Had 2 phone interviews 2 weeks later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are given a string with billions of characters spread across many geographically separate machines. Devise a distributed algorithm to find the first non-repeating character in this large string.
I applied through college or university. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Mar 2012
Interview
Applied through the college recruiting for Amzn. Had two rounds of interview. The first interviewer focused on design pattern questions- why this specific design over the other design pattern for this particular question. The second interviewer asked me questions on the projects, asked a few questions on hashtables, Array manipulations. This was basically a problem solving and algorithms round- asked me a variation of knapsack problem.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Apparently the interviewer had also done a similar kind of a project at school so he started digging deep into the project. This was a search engine project. He asked me about page rank etc.