I applied through other source. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Amazon in Oct 2016
Interview
Bottom line: Amazon is opaque and difficult to talk to. I thought I would have a good chance at getting an interview, considering a colleague of mine with the same college education and work experience (we were at the same job out of school) was hired there, but it wasn't enough. The lack of communication makes me question whether or not the company would have been a good place to work, because I can't imagine how frustrating it would be to deal with others in the organization that just refuse to answer you when you reach out to them.
I reached out to Amazon several times:
1. I reached out to a friend who was working at Amazon. He told me he gave it to his manager. I badgered him weekly for over a month before he told me that his manager didn't have a job to offer after all. That's ok, but it took a long time to hear back.
2. I reached out to a previous recruiter. This recruiter said that she would see if she had anything available. I emailed her to check in every week or two, but she never got back to me.
3. I found a job through the Amazon Jobs site and applied through email, because their application website was not working. After two to three weeks I heard back from someone, who said a member on their team would reach out to me. I waited two weeks before emailing her again, stating that no one got in touch with me. She told me a different member of her team would reach out to me. I waited another two weeks before trying to contact the person directly, which failed. Finally, after emailing the job recruiter again, she told me that the team decided not to go forward with my resume. I asked if they could tell me why, so that I could improve my resume, and I was told that they couldn't get me that information.
3.5 Several people reached out to me about jobs that would have required relocation. I told them that I would not be able to do that, but I would be interested if they knew someone I could talk to for a job in my area. I didn't hear back from any of them.
Other Software Engineer interview reviews for Amazon
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.
The phone screen went longer than expected, focusing heavily on implementation details. The interviewer really grilled me on my approach to a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache, asking how I'd combine a hashmap with a doubly linked list. I felt well-prepared since I had gone through system design examples on PracHub, which made me comfortable discussing eviction policies. The later rounds included more technical questions and behavioral interviews, but in the end, I received an offer, though I ultimately decided to decline. Overall, I’d say the process was average, with solid questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design and implement a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1) average time. Walk through combining a hashmap with a doubly linked list, eviction policy when capacity is exceeded, and how you'd extend it to handle thread-safe concurrent access.