I applied in-person. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2018
Interview
The potential manager reached out to me first. After an informal call with him checking whether our interests match, I had 2 phone screens with researchers people on that team. In the first one, I was asked machine learning/deep learning theory, with a practical task to program an LSTM cell update; following was the coding round where I programmed a simple search algorithm for navigating in a maze.
In the second screening, we only discussed a specific machine learning problem (apparently the one interviewer was himself working on recently).
At the end, the tasks are of average difficulty (harder on the ML side, easier on the coding side), but the way they assess your work is rather unpredictable.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Why would you regularize a neural network? List all the ways you know how to do it
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.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Tokyo) in Apr 2026
Interview
The interview for the Applied Scientist position primarily focused on three core components: technical questions regarding machine learning, a live coding assessment, and a detailed review of my professional experience.