Amazon Software Engineer interview questions

4 Amazon recruiters came to my school for a week to host interviews with candidates who had been selected from online submissions. After the first interview, they called me back and said they wanted to continue the interview process, so I can back in the next two days for a grand total of 4 interviews - one with each of the recruiters. The recruiters were fair and asked questions which any graduating software engineer should be able to answer. They consisted mostly of technical questions involving data structures and binary trees in particular, with a couple personal questions mixed in, such as "what interests you about Amazon?" or "tell me about this project on your resume".

2 rounds of phone interviews, then 6 on-site. Standard tech interview questions: binary trees, string parsing. Lots of discussion of memory management, performance, managed vs unmanaged code. Whiteboard coding of course. I ended up in a conference room where the interviewers came to me... this means that there were no breaks in between, so it ended up being rather rapid-fire and I wasn't thinking as clearly by the end of the day. All the interviewers were really nice though and would have been good coworkers. Amazon seems like a fast-moving company with a lot of cool stuff happening. They're getting big but they haven't realized it yet... they need to grow up a bit and realize that working people to the bone is not sustainable nor does it produce good long-term results. They offer a lot of money but it's not so mind-blowing once you figure in healthcare costs, no annual bonus, etc. Lots of stock in the compensation, so your comp is strongly dependent on how you think the stock will do. At a P/E of > 100 (as of 12/11), there's not a lot of headroom there.