First round: phone call with a potential peer. We mostly talked about my background and motivation. We honed in on a few behavioral questions such as "Tell me about a time when a project didn't go well."
Next round: phone call with hiring manager. Some general behavioral questions and then we dove into how to design a whisper sync like feature. Focus was on data structures, scalability and reasons why we may utilize non-relational store over a RDBMS.
Finally, I flew out to Seattle for the on-site interviews.
First meeting was with someone from HR who explained the process and gave some advice: be prepared to answer with detail and that some questions are ambiguous and will need you to get more information.
2nd was with a technical project manager. He was very energetic and positive. Things went really fast, with us starting with my background but quickly jumping off into a technology that I had worked with (over 8 years ago) and then diagraming on the board. In retrospect, I would have redirected towards a technology with which I was more familiar and described instead. A few questions about leadership, then we dove into detail around case problem where a production system was having an issue. I brought up a specific incident and we went into detail around this. The key thing they were looking for was being extremely careful w/ the production environment and mitigating the impact to the customer as much as possible.
3rd was with a SDE where we briefly went over my background but went into a design exercise on a specific feature of Amazon. I believe what they are looking for here is to understand the thought process and necessary trade-offs in the design to achieve large scale. I believe it's key to slow down and walk through your assumptions and reasons. In retrospect, I don't think I did this as well as I would have liked. I think the design was fine, but I was a bit scattered when describing it, jumping in and out of different ideas before honing in on this. In truth, my style is a bit like this where I'll sample and try a ton of ideas and think out loud, but I believe in this part, you need to slow down and proceed a bit more methodically.
4th was a lunch interview with the hiring manager, which went deeper into leadership. It was also an opportunity to ask a lot of questions about Amazon and it's culture.
Finally after lunch was the "bar raiser" who came from a different area within Amazon. There was another individual in the room who didn't ask questions but sat in. The questions largely focused on team building and management. "How do you motivate a top performer?" "Did you ever have to manage someone out of the company?"
I was very impressed with the caliber of the individuals and the passion that they had for the company and its approach. Moreover, all the interviewers were friendly and down to earth. The interview questions weren't necessarily challenging, but they were looking for depth and detail.
I just completed so no idea if an offer is coming. I am hoping that on balance they'll see the positive, but it remains to be seen.
*Edit*
Was contacted and an offer is now on the table. Tough decision now as I'm debating between two offers.
