I had a great time at Amazon. Amazonians were super friendly, smart and easy going, it made me feel welcome. The recruiter was amazing and they have provided all information I needed for the interview, explained the role and what is expected for each step of the interview etc. The interview process was long, intense and difficult but somehow necessary for the huge expectations and responsibilities required for the role, I also think think they receive a huge amount of volume and candidates from all over the place so handling that is not easy, they need to draw a line and it may take a while to respond to you but don’t be mad about it, just follow up after a week and try again if you fail. I had two phone interviews one technical screening and a second behavioral question interview followed by an onsite interview at Amazon called “the loop”. In my opinion, the loop was intense and the hardest part of the process, you will be sitting in a room for 5 hours answering questions nonstop until they can extract everything from you.
My interview was schedule for 11:30AM, I was in a hotel 20 minutes away from Amazon’s Herndon, VA office, the recruiter called me at the hotel on the interview day at 9:30AM to say that my interview was rescheduled to start at 10AM, not sure if they dropped the ball or wanted to test how flexible I am but that didn't help my performance during the interview. My interview started at 10:15AM and it went until around 4:30PM. The loop was very intense, I only had 5 minutes each round to ask questions back to the interviewer and I had only one chance to go to the bathroom and drink water during lunch time. I was talking a lot trying to answer all those behaviors questions and my mouth was super dry, it would be good if water and breaks between interview rounds were provided more often but time is very limited at Amazon.
I liked all interviewers and Amazon staff, they were super friendly, professional, hard working and smart people. The hire manager was awesome and super smart, the bar raiser asked a lot of difficult questions that made me freeze for a while, they don’t tell who he/she is but you will notice it. I went until the last round and did a presentation at the end. A week later I received an e-mail saying “thanks but you failed”. They don’t provide feedback but I pay attention to things and I know what I should improve, I think I did provide a bad example for resilience/fail tolerance on my presentation and I need to improve my DevOps skills. I learned a lot during the interview and it gave me more motivation to keep studying hard, working hard. I think I would have done better now with all the knowledge acquired over the couple of months. My take is that, I failed the interview but I'm not giving up on them, I'm studying like crazy to improve my skills, polish my presentation skills and be more prepared to apply again in 6 months. I'm looking forward to work for Amazon one day but there are other good companies out there too.
My free advise is, they care a lot about customer experience and they are looking for a smart, easy going person that fits their culture, pay attention to your customer, dive deep and focus on the other Amazon Leadership Principals read the book “Amazon Way” and try to think what you did in the past that is similar to the 14 principals, sometimes is hard to remember what you did 5 years ago but it will be tested on the interview! Try to deliver the message in a structured manner, don't bs them, make sure to include leadership principals and technical details of real situations, what was accomplished and what both company and customer got from it.
