I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in May 2017
Interview
I was contacted by a technical recruiter to go through another round of interviews for the Applied Scientist position after completing interviews for the Software Development Engineer position.
The whole process was completed within a month. Since I have already been through a round of interviews for the Software Development Engineer position, I only had two interviews - a phone interview with a researcher (not from the same hiring team) and on-site interviews with three interviewers - hiring manager and two other researchers (not from the same hiring team).
All interviews started on-time and lasted 45 minutes. The interviewers were very attentive and engaged during the discussions.
After the on-site interview, I was contacted by the technical recruiter about the hiring team's decision within 2 days, and was sent the actual offer within a week. Before accepting the offer, the recruiting team helped to organized a couple of calls with the hiring manager and another person on the team to allow me to ask questions. I found this helpful in making an informed decision.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Since I signed an NDA, I am not able to give much details here. But in general, besides cultural-fit questions based on Amazon's leadership principles, I was asked three types of technical questions - a general workflow optimization problem, a specific problem faced by a researcher at Amazon, and technical questions on my research. For broad problem statements, it helps to start by listing out the possible directions the problem could go and interactively narrow down the requirements into a specific area of interest.
Applied for Amazon AGI. After first round, it will go into full round of multiple interviews. Lots of modern LLM training technic questions. There are still some behavioral questions, but less than general Amazon roles.
Interviewed with 1 phone screen, 1 coding, 2 ml design and 2 lp rounds. Most questions were non-leetcode questions more related to day to day ml implementations. The questions were very practical.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Tokio) in Apr 2026
Interview
The interview for the Applied Scientist position primarily focused on three core components: technical questions regarding machine learning, a live coding assessment, and a detailed review of my professional experience.