Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 48% positive. To compare, the company-average is 57.5% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 24 days to get hired, when considering 3,654 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 Software Engineer according to 3,654 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 30%
One on one interview: 18%
Skills test: 17%
Presentation: 10%
Personality test: 7%
Group panel interview: 6%
IQ intelligence test: 5%
Background check: 4%
Other: 2%
Drug test: 2%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2014
Interview
I interviewed with the Kindle team. I was contacted by a recruited who found my information through LinkedIn. There was a online coding exercise followed by a phone interview. A few days after the phone interview, I was contacted and told that they wanted me to fly out to Seattle to interview in person. The on-site interview was relatively relaxed, but somewhat difficult. I interviewed with two separate people. The first guy was very personable, and he asked me several basic computer science questions. Things like explaining a binary search tree and sorting an array of integers with a recursive algorithm. The second guy was much less personable, maybe a good-cop-bad-cop kind of setup. He asked me to design an app that would help in planning routes for amazon delivery trucks. Overall, it was an interesting experience, and I got a free trip to Seattle.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design an app for planning routes and tracking delivery trucks. The app would manage multiple trucks dispatched from multiple warehouses with the same city.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
The process started with a brief 30-minute phone screening with a recruiter, focusing on my background and resume.
After that, I was invite to a technical video interview with a senior engineer. This round lasted about 60 minutes, starting with a brief introduction, followed by a live coding challenge on a shared editor, and ended with a few questions about system design basics and my past projects.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement a function to find the first non-repeating character in a string and discuss its time and space complexity.
I got a take home exam on HackerRank that I did not do great in. I did not perfectly solve every problem. Then it was another problem with "AI assistance" except the AI seemed programmed to be as useless as possible, it's genuinely better to just not use it. Somehow I got the next interview anyways, who also asked me some leetcode style questions and asked my to explain my experience and then next day they rejected me.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is the most complex problem I have encountered?
The interview process was straightforward with no surprises — three coding rounds (LeetCode medium difficulty), a system design round, and a cultural fit conversation. The interviewers were pleasant and the overall atmosphere was positive.
That said, it's worth noting that this format feels dated. Even before the rise of AI, LeetCode-style assessments were a questionable proxy for real-world engineering ability and cultural fit. In today's environment, where AI can solve most of these problems instantly, continuing to use this framework raises the question of what signal it's actually measuring.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
For coding it was ask very similar to number of islands (2D grid search) with a twist.