Research Scientist applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon with 3.1 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 53% positive. To compare, the company-average is 57.5% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Research Scientist roles take an average of 31 days to get hired, when considering 96 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Amazon overall takes an average of 28 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Amazon as a Research Scientist according to 96 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 39%
One on one interview: 21%
Skills test: 14%
Presentation: 8%
Background check: 6%
Group panel interview: 3%
IQ intelligence test: 3%
Personality test: 3%
Drug test: 2%
Other: 1%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Amazon in Apr 2017
Interview
I applied through an employee referral. It took almost 2 month for me to get an email from a recruiter asking for the time I can do a phone interview for next two weeks. After sending my schedule to the recruiter, I was not contacted by them for the next two weeks. Then another recruiter emailed me again ask for my availability for the next week and finally set up the date for my first phone interview.
The first phone interview are pretty standard. The interviewer is very nice. I first introduced my research and he asked a few questions about my project. Then he asked some question regarding to some machine learning method like tree, SVM, random forest and boosting, The last 10 mins was about coding. I got email from recruiter that night said they scheduled the second phone interview for me tomorrow.
The second interview was focus on data structure and algorithm. Since I am from statistics background, I was not expecting a SDE type of interview. I was asked to solve two coding questions and the interviewer also asked a question regarding to fast searching algorithm ?? I never heard about that algorithm. I did not do well on the second interview.
I got reject email a few days after the second phone interview. The recruiter in that company are not very professional.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe tree, SVM, random forest and boosting. Talk about their advantage and disadvantages.
I had a zoom call with the hiring manager. I was asked technical questions during the interview, such as "How do you compute the conditional median of a set of data points?"
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
If u ~ Uniform(0, 1), what is the distribution of -log(u)? Solution: Expontial(1).
Five interviews, all had behavioral components, three coding questions, one system design question. The behavioral questions were of the form "Tell me about a time when..." and were meant to reflect Amazon's Leadership Principles.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about a time when you were unhappy with the status quo
Pretty fast and well-organized interview process. Scheduling was easy, communication of different interview expectations was clear, and feedback came quickly after each stage, which made the overall experience quite smooth.