I interviewed at Amazon (East Palo Alto, CA) in Apr 2021
Interview
I was offered a phone screen nearly a month after I submitted an application. After the phone screen about one week later I was offered a virtual onsite. The virtual onsite last for 5-6 hours. And three days later I got a phone call telling me that I don't have a offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Aside from the questions about the work and project experience on my resume, nearly 90% of the questions are behavioral questions. I don't remember every one of them (I was asked at least 10 behavioral questions, I guess nearly 20, throughout that 5 hour long virtual onsite), but here are some of them that I can remember:
- Tell me about a time when you gave a simple solution to a complex problem.
- Tell me about a time when you had to work with limited time or resources.
- Tell me about a time you had too much on your plate to deal with and how you handled getting everything done.
- Tell me about a time when you couldn’t meet your own expectations on a project.
There was only one coding question, which is writing a simple English tokenizer in Python.
Also there was some linguistic questions. One of them was given a sentence, answer the POS tag of each word, the dependency relations between words, and the syntax structure of the sentence, and also identify any semantic ambiguities. And there are some methodology questions like given a large uncleaned data set how do you evaluate the data quality; how do you keep track of the vendors annotation quality; how do you write a data annotation guideline, etc.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
This was probably the worst experience of my professional life. The recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn to share the job description and requested a few details. After that, he would call me randomly throughout the day without scheduling the calls.
Moving forward, they scheduled a "Meet the Team" call to help me understand the company's culture, but nobody showed up for the call. I was informed that the person they selected had meetings to attend, which felt odd.
Later, I had my first interview scheduled with an engineer from the team at 10 PM (my local time) to align with their working hours. Unfortunately, the interviewer failed to show up, and after waiting for about 45 minutes, I decided to leave. I attempted to email the recruiter afterward but never heard back.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Boston, MA) in Mar 2026
Interview
One thing I found challenging during the interview was the format of the behavioral question about exceeding expectations. I began answering using the STAR method to provide a structured and complete response, but I was frequently interrupted with follow-up questions before I could finish my thought.
As a non-native English speaker, this was particularly difficult for me. When I was interrupted, I lost track of where I was in my story and struggled to refocus and pick up from where I had left off. It disrupted my train of thought and made it hard to deliver the full context and outcome of the situation I was describing.
I would have felt more comfortable and confident if I had been given the space to complete my answer before follow-up questions were asked.
I had a 1 hour phone screening. First half was behavioral interview on the LPs and the second part was technical interview where I had to live code and also answer questions on NLP topics.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about a time when you solved a complex problem.