I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Bengaluru) in Jul 2013
Interview
Interviews in Bangalore office never follows the guideline as advertized in the website. There were no telephonic interviews at all and a mere single round of face to face interview for a senior position. Just 3 questions of which one was about yourself and 2 design questions that too at an algorithmic level.
1. For a set of streaming numbers (maybe billions) design a data structure to compute sum, average and median.
2. Design an Instant Messaging system at a high level including the possible number of servers for around 10 million users. The features include buddy list and presence updates.
Also an opinion was formed that iPhone SDK does not support C++.
The organization should definitely refine the process considering the fact that a single opinion is normally not considered good enough to hire senior professionals.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design an Instant Messaging system at a high level including the possible number of servers for around 10 million users. The features include buddy list and presence updates.
I applied through other source. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
Went through a phone screen with someone from HR followed by two technical phone interviews. After that I was brought out to Seattle to interview in person. That day was especially grueling with 6 interviews lasting 45 minutes each including one over lunch which was especially awkward to be interviewed at the same time as you tried to eat lunch. Overall, I can't say I was overly surprised with any of the content but the length of time and number of interviews that you went through made for a long day.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
On the whiteboard, design a high-availability system that can take in the periodic table of elements and then output the largest word that can be formed with the elements. Once that was done, describe and design different ways to optimize the system.
The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (New York, NY) in May 2012
Interview
I applied online and received an email from HR in 1 week. She scheduled a phone screening interview. I have asked her a follow up question about the interview: salary range and the role of the person conducting the interviews. I received no repose at all. After a phone screening I got no feedback as well.