I applied online. The process took 7 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Nov 2021
Interview
The interview for PhD students is fairly straightforward. You give 2-3 interviews which include technical and behavioural rounds. It can take around 6 - 8. weeks to complete the interview process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Few recommendations,
- Be ready for typical behavioural questions. Preparation beforehand is a must.
- LC easy-medium questions.
- Be ready to answer questions related to your past/ongoing projects. Sometimes, the interviewer can go deep into the technical details of the project.
- Explore Amazon research beforehand and figure out where your research work fits best and if possible mention this in the interview.
- Last but not least, prepare a few questions you would like to ask the interviewer in the end (there will be dedicated time for that)
Overall, it's a great experience and you get to learn a lot. Best of luck!
Phone screen interview
Then onsite interviews: 5 interviews two on coding and three on science and a tech talk
You choose a topic for the presentation
The science interviews are: one on science depth, one on science breath and one on science applications
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Question on optimizers; comparing gradient decent, adam optimizer etc
Applied for Amazon AGI. After first round, it will go into full round of multiple interviews. Lots of modern LLM training technic questions. There are still some behavioral questions, but less than general Amazon roles.
Interviewed with 1 phone screen, 1 coding, 2 ml design and 2 lp rounds. Most questions were non-leetcode questions more related to day to day ml implementations. The questions were very practical.