I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA)
Interview
Started with the standard 2 online rounds. Didn't ace the technical questions on the second round but made it to the onsites anyway.
At no point in the process did I actually get to speak with the recruiter. All communication was seemingly through computer-generated emails and your responses seem to go into some digital black hole. My onsite interview was delayed twice after the spot I asked for "filled up" despite answering the email within 5 minutes. When my interview finally scheduled I had to send many urgent emails because I was not contacted in order to schedule flights until 2 days before my interview.
I had the "group" interview in Seattle. The group portion only lasts a few minutes, the rest of the time you're coding on your own. An engineer speaks to you for about 15 minutes at the end. I could hardly understand the engineer I was paired with, he had a very think accent and was very quite so that made communication difficult. Finally, getting my results took OVER A MONTH which is, frankly, unacceptable. I've interviewed at many companies large and small and no one has ever taken anything close to that amount of time.
My interview experience gave the impression that Amazon doesn't really care about you as an individual, you're just a part in their machine. The entire process was shockingly impersonal.
Recruiter screen, online assessment, technical interviews, and behavioral rounds focused heavily on Amazon Leadership Principles. The process was structured, with a strong emphasis on problem-solving, coding skills, and examples demonstrating impact and ownership.
Recruiter screen, followed by an online coding assessment and then a technical phone interview. The final round was a virtual onsite loop with multiple interviews covering data structures, system design, debugging, and Amazon Leadership Principles. The technical questions were practical but time-constrained, and the behavioural questions required specific examples using the STAR format.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a scalable URL shortening service and explain how you would handle high read traffic, collisions, database schema, expiration, and basic monitoring.
That moment when the interviewer asked about finding indices in an array for a target sum was wild — I had just tackled something identical while prepping on PracHub. The interview included a technical round with another question about designing an in-memory LRU cache and a behavioral question about meeting tight deadlines. After a smooth discussion, I was told I'd received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, the process felt pretty straightforward and not overly challenging.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of integers return the indices of two numbers summing to a target