I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Dec 2020
Interview
Recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn, Started the process, was very helpful and also coached me through the process, very prompt in replies. I had 1 Phone screen , got reply within 3 hours that onsite will be scheduled, 4 Onsite rounds (2 coding and 2 Design) 3 rounds were scheduled first then the second design round was scheduled a week after the first 3 onsite rounds, pretty standard for amazon. After the 2nd design round the recruiter wouldn't pickup my calls or return emails for about 2 weeks after which i get an email saying they will not be moving with my candidature forward.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Tempe, AZ) in Mar 2019
Interview
The first round was a debug test. Questions involve resolving syntax or semantic errors in code.
The second round was a normal coding test.
The third round was an interview with an Engineer/Manager.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The interview consisted of questions regarding past projects, some HR questions, and a coding question.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Amazon (New York, NY) in Nov 2020
Interview
A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn and asked if I was available to interview. I scheduled a 30 minute initial screening with them. It included the basic, tell me about yourself question, the nature of work done, how big the team is that I am a part of and how many people have I mentored or managed directly followed by what is the number of customers serviced by the products I have worked on developing. They shared study material after that which included a Data Structures Big O time notation sheet, some brochures about the company and team and links to Leetcode, Hackerrank and Cracking The Coding Interview.
They sent me an online assessment in a few weeks. I asked them to send it after a month so that I could prepare prior to taking the assessment. I prepared by solving as many Amazon tagged Leetcode problems as possible. There were 2 questions (both were LC medium) sliding window problems. I solved one and all the test cases passed. I was close to the output for the second one but some test cases did not pass. Both my solutions were optimized and ran in O(n) time. They progressed me to the onsite rounds.
There were 4 rounds, 2 System Design, 1 Object Oriented Design and 1 coding round. I was surprised by the number of design rounds and had unfortunately not prepared some of the topics they asked and not prepared for OOD rounds either. They also asked several Leadership Principle (LP) questions, they expected a concise answer following the STAR approach and asked not to mention "we" but talk about what "I" did specifically. They had 2 to 3 follow-up questions on every LP answer. The onsite lasted all day, was virtual and was exhausting. I experienced poor connectivity issues on my interviewer's end in 1 of the interviews so that one ran longer than the others into the lunch break. The whiteboarding tool they suggested also did not work well with Amazon Chime, upon screen sharing, the tool did not work as it did without screen sharing. I would recommend testing the whiteboarding tools recommended by them thoroughly before the onsite rounds. Some don't work as expected.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I mentioned the nature of questions and covered topics in the description.