I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Amazon in Aug 2020
Interview
Applied through a referral. I didn't actually apply for a senior role, I applied for a mid-level DS role, but they switched the job rec on me mid interview process.
The recruiter was 40 minutes late to our call, and spent only spent 5 minutes on the phone mostly confirming the skills from my resume. Told me there would be two tech phone screens and a virtual onsite if I passed.
Between the recruiter screen and first phone screen, the job description changed on me without notice, from mid-level to senior, and requiring 5 years of experience with ML. Phone screener asked me solely about ML for an hour, especially XGBoost, and didn't ask if I had questions until after the allotted time. When I asked about DS there, they said they were in a role very different from what I'm applying for and that they couldn't tell me what it would be like. Got a rejection the next business day.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you calculate correlation between a binary variable and a continuous variable?
They described their background. Then, I did the same. Then we turned to ML questions, which are listed below. There was a coding exercise, also listed below. Finally there was time for my questions.
Interview questions [6]
Question 1
What is the difference between bagging and boosting?
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Amazon (New York, NY) in May 2020
Interview
Had 2 virtual on-sites, with 5 and 3 reps, set apart for 1 month. First set was more towards machine learning optimization, with some coding and a lot of leadership principles, second set was pure data science.
Did very well in the first set, but did not want to take that specific role, so they suggested to get a second set, which went very well as well. But after the interview recruiter emailed me that group decided to go with another candidate, and stonewalled all requests of getting on the phone. I wasted too much time for them and don't think such an attitude from a recruiter is professional, and i won't consider Amazon again just because of that.
Don't recommend to anyone, if you care about well-built recruiting system and reps professionalism.