I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2012
Interview
Everything went well even the manager to be stated very much interested in having me on board at the very end giving every indication of an offer, only to my surprise at the last HR ended with no further explanation even after request. In every stage I was straight with every question they asked, but seemed they asked personal family and house questions in the last, could be a relocation issue but would have been decent if I was given the option to be the one deciding of relocation challenges.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What are the challenges in designing an application
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2012
Interview
I applied on LinkedIn. Next day I got email from the recruiter to schedule initial phone screening. Two days later we have our first screening. She asked me about my current role and behavioral questions on deep analysis. She asked me to describe challenges faced. After the interview, she described their hiring process, that there will be 2 phone screening and everything goes well, 1 day of in-person interviews.
Next the hiring manager called. Again it was all about behavioral questions. Questions on how I manage priorities, things I proud of, project management skills etc.
Second phone screening was done by another development manager. It was technical in nature. He asked me to describe MVC pattern. Since it was very high level question, I took an example of shopping cart and explained what will go under each M, V and C. We went in discussion around my answer. Second question was about designing a file system. This one caught me little off guard. He had created a session on a some site where we could share the session. I had type the classes and methods as I designed. This could have been a big design exercise but with limitation on the time, we wrapped up. I wasn't sure whether I gave enough details.
2 days later, I got email asking me to come in for in-person interview. I had given full day's schedule, directions, lunch options etc. It was very well planned. From the schedule, I could tell that 2-3 interviews will be technical including the bar raiser and others will be more on my management style. At the end of the day, I knew that I had done pretty good on all of my interviews and was expecting an offer.
I got my final offer in hand 1 week later.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Addition and multiplication of two matrix containing millions of entries. Most of the values are zeros.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Chennai) in Jan 2012
Interview
1. 2 telephonic interviews - based on problem solving, data structures and alogrithms
2. 4 1:1 interviews -
a. system design interview
b. problem solving
c. datastructures and algorithms
d. people management