I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Cape Town) in Aug 2015
Interview
Two phone interviews after which was to be an in person interview. You have to pass the previous interview to be taken for the next stage. I failed the second phone interview so I did not move on to the in person interviews. It was average in difficulty but I failed the second phone interview because some of the stuff asked were things I had done before but never needed to do again so I never had them fresh in my head e.g adding a new partition and mounting it on your machine is not something you do often.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
First Interview: What happens in the browser when you type Amazon.com?, How do you scale a PHP application?, Tell me about a time when you did more than was needed by a client?, How do you host two websites using the same IP?, How do you check the states of slow running queries in databases and ho do you optimize them ?, How would you migrate an application from Google Cloud Datastore to Amazon S3?(I would say this was specific to me because I had earlier stated that I had experience with the Google Cloud Platform), What is the difference between absolute and relative URLs and what are the advantages/disadvantages of each?, What is the deafault MySQL port?
Second Interview (was OS focused): Can you explain the Linux boot process?, How do you install a package in Ubuntu? What does apt-get update do? What does apt-get upgrade do? What ports are used for SSH, SSL and what is the default MySQL port?(repetition from first interview), How do you make a user the owner of a file in Linux? How do you change permissions? What is the meaning of the various codes used in assigning permissions in chmod and what does each position signify?, How do you connect a new disk partition and mount it in Linux?, What is iptables? What is an inode?
It was a 4 round loop. The first two rounds focused on networking and troubleshooting, plus questions about your domain. The last two rounds are just answering questions using leadership principles in STAR format.
The interview was smooth. Recruiter reached out with an invitation to an online assessment, then a phone interview 1 hour and interview loop scheduled after that. It had 4 rounds
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Depends on the domain of the role. I had Networking domain, so most questions were on Linux and troubleshooting.
It was difficult , questions about os and computer network and one easy coding question , the coding question was prime number question, also asked behavioural questions which are to be answered in STAR format