Software Engineer 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 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2013
Interview
Group interview (university graduates). The candidates were assigned to groups of 2-3 people. Every group is to complete a project which has 3 kind-of-independent subproblem. It's suggested that each candidate responsible for one subproblem. It's more like a individual project, since everybody's input/output file is independent from his teammates'. The problem is not hard if familiar with OOP and java, and time is sufficient. It's important to understand the requirement of all 3 parts of the problem to get better insight of your own part.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Vancouver, BC)
Interview
Initially contacted by headhunter. Did 2 phone interviews, one basic HR, another one with a very nice programmer, followed by a programming challenge to send in. Then I was asked for an on-site interview in Vancouver. The on-site was really tough, 6 interviews back to back with no break (even lunch is a conversation with your potential manager and one of the IT managers higher-up).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you design the complete architecture for image storage of Amazon.com storage? Another one was, how would you design a key-value store? I hadn't worked with a lot of big distributed applications so I struggled with these two. I had prepared a lot for the on-site, but the questions were a lot different than the phone interview questions, which mostly focused on small scale algorithms.
There was an one hour phone interview asking about basic programming algorithm and computer science fundamental knowledge. Not difficult. They also asked about UNIX experience.