I applied through university. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Amazon (San Francisco, CA) in Oct 2016
Interview
Applied on their website. Got back to me a week later with a coding challenge. It was about an hour long and involved debugging some sample code. It was pretty easy and I was able to complete it even though I was not entirely sober. They video tape you the entire time. Heard back that I passed and moved on.
After a coding challenge as a first step, most companies usually move to a phone screen. This was not the case with Amazon. I was invited to complete another coding challenge online. This challenge would also be video taped and IT WAS 4 HOURS LONG.
Seriously Amazon? 5 hours of video taped online challenges just to even to speak to someone who works at your company? We are all busy students. How much time do you think we have? As if your corporate culture wasn't bad and abrasive enough, even your interview process is awful. It's appalling that competitors like Google and Facebook have such friendly processes that involve working with a recruiter at every step and Amazon can't even be bothered to make candidates feel welcome. Clearly they are just looking for code monkeys who can stand such poor treatment because they will not complain once they are hired and are subject to Amazon's corporate culture.
Luckily, I had multiple offers at other firms where I was respected as an engineer and a human being. Good riddance.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The coding challenge had very basic coding errors, such as off by one, missing braces, etc.
Recruiter screen, followed by an online coding assessment and then a technical phone interview. The final round was a virtual onsite loop with multiple interviews covering data structures, system design, debugging, and Amazon Leadership Principles. The technical questions were practical but time-constrained, and the behavioural questions required specific examples using the STAR format.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a scalable URL shortening service and explain how you would handle high read traffic, collisions, database schema, expiration, and basic monitoring.
That moment when the interviewer asked about finding indices in an array for a target sum was wild — I had just tackled something identical while prepping on PracHub. The interview included a technical round with another question about designing an in-memory LRU cache and a behavioral question about meeting tight deadlines. After a smooth discussion, I was told I'd received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, the process felt pretty straightforward and not overly challenging.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of integers return the indices of two numbers summing to a target
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.