I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Aug 2016
Interview
Phone interview, Take-home online coding test, On-site interviews (5-8). Unfortunately, in one of the on-site interviews, the interviewer was not paying attention and gave wrong information to a question (ensuring I was on the wrong track completely for a very basic design pattern question). Beyond that, the preparation document they give you will mention all sorts of fancy algorithms and mathematical concepts, yet they will ask you to solve some basic coding puzzles involving none of those things.
Recruiter screen, online assessment, technical interviews, and behavioral rounds focused heavily on Amazon Leadership Principles. The process was structured, with a strong emphasis on problem-solving, coding skills, and examples demonstrating impact and ownership.
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