The process took 1 day. I interviewed at AWS Elemental in May 2016
Interview
1hr phone screen, then in-person. I did not make it to in-person (not a fit). Interviewer seemed inexperienced, and unwilling to deviate from questions/phone screen format + a lot of interviews to get through. The questions were all very vague excepting the coding exercise, which was very specific and difficult to do in a timed situation.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a range of IP addresses how to code parse to collect all IP addresses in an apache log.
Now bucket them into each individual hits and what each request uri was for each hit.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at AWS Elemental (Portland, OR) in Nov 2016
Interview
Industry standard: email from recruiter, technical screening phone call, and then an on-site interview. The technical screening was fine (same "apache log IP address" question other candidates have already written about). On-site was a mixed bag: the culture very much feels spit between Elemental's legacy and Amazon's ruthlessly standardized processes.
All of the technical sessions during the on-site interview were done in a web-based text editor, not a programmers editor. There was no referring to language docs allowed, so you'd better know the names and expected arguments of every obscure method you're hoping to use during their algorithm drills. If you have a more practical background than a formal CS background, you're not going to do well unless you've filled in CS fundamentals.
There's a lot of soft-skills questions about experiences, good and bad . Standard behavioral-based interviewing questions, pretty much taken straight from the Amazon how-to-interview manual.
Overall, their process was quick but it wasn't really an enjoyable experience. No feedback was offered when the phone call to decline came through, and I didn't ask for any as I do not think I would reapply in the future.