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.
First, I had an online interview which took about an hour. Then, I was invited for an on-site interview which took a full day. It was different interviews with different people of the group.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
General behaviour questions and some data questions.
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Vancouver, BC) in Mar 2021
Interview
1-hour phone interview followed by 5x 1-hour virtual "on-site" interviews. All interviewers were friendly and easy to talk to, making for a positive overall experience.
I was told interviewers had positive things to say and was invited to reapply in a year or two. Personally, I feel their policy of not giving any tangible feedback leaves me with no real incentive to ever reapply.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a function which takes a string and determines whether it is an anagram of a palindrome