The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Amazon in Jul 2010
Interview
First, a phone screen with a recruiter. Then a standard call with the hiring manager. He described the position again and I spent time going through my background and how it would fit. Immediately got called back after the interview and scheduled another phone interview for the next day. The next interview went well and he asked some SQL (joins / nested queries) and Excel (vlookup) questions. Next was an onsite interview where I met 5 other people. They were nice but most seemed to be overworked. No one seemed to stay in a role for a very long time at Amazon. Hours seemed a bit rough for an established company - I was told to expect 90 hour weeks. Most questions were behavioral or brain teasers. -How many windows are in Seattle. What is better the Kindle or Amazon Web Services and why. On site interview also contained more SQL questions.
The interview process includes a SQL test, an initial recruiter call, and a final five-round loop featuring technical questions and discussions focused on Amazon leadership principles with different team members.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked a key question focused on both technical depth and culture fit: how you apply your skills to solve real problems, along with examples demonstrating alignment with Amazon’s leadership principles.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA)
Interview
Interviewed for Business Analyst role at Amazon and honestly the process felt exhausting and impersonal.
The interviewers seemed far more focused on checking boxes against the 14 Leadership Principles than actually understanding the candidate or having a genuine conversation. Almost every question was another version of a STAR behavioral scenario, even when it barely related to the actual role.
The process felt extremely rehearsed and rigid. There was little effort to make the candidate feel comfortable or valued, and it often felt like they had already decided the outcome before the interview even started.
Technical and analytical depth barely mattered compared to how perfectly you could package stories into Amazon’s preferred format. If you don’t have polished STAR stories memorized for every possible situation, the process can feel unnecessarily difficult and draining.
Overall, one of the most mentally exhausting interview experiences I’ve had.
The basic STAR format, but the team was not clear about what they were looking for. The recruiter was not very responsive and took a long time to schedule the calls
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