I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Feb 2013
Interview
The company will ask you to do two exercises before they invite you for an interview. Both technical. The first one is hands-on and the second one is similar to writing a proposal for a client seeking IT support from AWS.
My experience was as follows:
The initial conversations by phone with the recruiter were quite pleasant. He sent me the first exercise by email. The email contained the requirements and a list of resources to find information/clues on how to deliver.
For an experienced system administrator the exercise is quite simple and only needs some experience with launching a system within the AWS cloud.
The second exercise is also pretty much simple assuming you are familiar with most AWS services and how to implement them. If you are not, just read through the list of resources included in the email and you will find the exact answers on their website. It's clear that the exercise was written by someone who also selected the list of resources to be included in the email.
Surprisingly I failed with the second test. The recruiter first wanted to finish it up with an email stating that I didn't clear their review and he list the gaps I forgot to address that came back from the architect team. I thought that it was unprofessional to do that by email because of the amount of time spent on the exercises by me.
The solutions provided by the architect that would cover the gaps I overlooked included non-AWS solutions and deliverables of requirements that were not part of the exercise. I replied with my feedback and received another email forwarded by the recruiter and coming from the architect team. That email repeated even more clearly requirements that were not part of the exercise, i.e. the client needed:
- Files to be served from EBS,
- Local file access,
- A backup solution.
The exercise said that S3 was not suitable because of the latency and throughput and the architect chose EBS RAID/Striping to solve this. My choice was S3 with CDN.
Secondly there is nothing said in the exercise about a backup requirement but there is a requirement for DR. So I suggested a Multi-AZ design. The architect writes that my deliverables are missing a backup solution and that Multi-AZ is not a backup solution!
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
S3 was not suitable because of the latency and throughput
Long process way too many gates to cross.
Several rounds and no feedback. Constantly felt cultish.
Interviewers were not prepared. Would.not reccomend.
If you be prepared to tailor all answer to the principles.
5 interviews were conducted in a day
3 were based on the principles
2 were technical
Technical interviewer was focused on specific topics which were not my specialty. Even on reminding multiple times, they did not change topic
Phone round & followed by 3 round interview. Most questions were around Data structure, Online test including aptitude and versant test. Aptitude test had 20 questions. hen there was 2 face to face interview. The interview experience was good.