I posted a resume online, and received an email from Amazon HR a few days later. HR was excellent--professional, courteous, and responsive. They set up an initial phone interview with a test manager. This was about an hour long, and used collabedit.com to share a whiteboard online.
I thought it went okay, then was contacted a week later to set up a second phone interview, this time with the hiring manager. Quite similar, but no collabedit.com this time, we discussed some code and he gave me a few minutes to write it, then I read it to him over the phone. Some more questions about testing scenarios, and that was it.
A few days later HR scheduled an on-site day of interviewing. This was in Seattle (they cover expenses required to attend the interview). I met with 5 technical interviewers, plus a follow-up with a rep from HR. Since my interview crossed the noon hour, Amazon paid for that interviewer to take me to lunch.
First interviewer described the team (Kindle) and what it was resposible for. I had prepared in anticipation of doing device-level testing, i.e., hardware validation, OS components, etc. Actually that is all accomplished in California, and the Seattle Kindle team is more traditional Amazon, in that they busy themselves with delivering online content (web ordering, e-book delivery, various web services issues). There was also a lot of discussion about how I might allocate my time between competing projects/interests, which I believe was a prompt to display that I thought that
Second interviewer concentrated on testing issues, such as what is TDD, unit tests vs. integration tests, more high-level issues.
Third interviewer was a developer from the Kindle team. We discussed how to approach testing the Kindle content delivery system, based on a block diagram of how it worked ("how would you test this module? How about this one?...).
Fourth interviewer talked about general high-level design issues with web servers and services, how different designs contribute to latency and throughput. Note to self, look up 'orthogonal', as in "Are latency and throughput orthogonal?" (The correct answer is "Yes!").
Fifth interviewer was the first to present a coding problem, namely how to design a system that returns a list of names based on a user entering 'letters' by pressing numbers on a phone (i.e., the first 3 letters of the name Smith would be represented by typing "7-6-4"). I didn't perform well on the coding problem. We were rushed, and the interviewer kept trying to be helpful and get things moving with hints and questions, but they just got me frazzled and self-doubting.
HR finished the day and walked me out.
Everyone was really, really nice. I was completely impressed by Amazon and will reapply in the future. After several years of working at Microsoft it is apparent that they have less internal friction at Amazon. I thought the interview process was quite fair, in fact most of it (before I tubed the coding question) was surprisingly easy and low-key.
Advice: no matter what engineering position you seek, think:
1. data-driven decision making
2. complexity ("Big-O notation")
3. network issues (latency, throughput, scalability)
4. customer-focus
