This process wasn't brief. It started with a recruiter that steered me to a position below my qualifications, continued with four phone interviews and concluded with being flown to Seattle during a holiday week where you're given six rapid fire interviews, with a guided lunch, over 3/4ths of a day. This transpired over two months, and ended with me being used as a benchmark to compare against internal candidates, one of whom was ultimately offered the position in question. Some things that are worth noting: While the recruiters are friendly and welcoming, don't expect your interviewers to be. One of the interviewers had nothing to do with the position in question and appeared to be there because his presence was compulsory. Two of them clearly had an agenda that involved ensuring another candidate was given the position, one of whom bordered on being outright rude. None of the interviewers had more than three years of experience at Amazon, and only one had hands on experience with the application in question. While the phone interviews will be fairly informal, the in person interviews will be strictly scripted and leave you, as the candidate, relatively little room to address the fundamental question of how you can benefit the organization. You are answering largely tersely asked boilerplate questions about experience, so be prepared to respond accordingly. Finally, you get a feel for how much people enjoy their positions based on their body language, tone/tenor and their ability to ask you actual day to day questions about challenges they face in their position; these types of conversations happened only once in the six interviews I experienced. You will most likely be dealing with multiple recruiters over the course of the process, and that makes it difficult to have a serious discussion about compensation/relocation etc. All in all, the process is cumbersome, disorienting and disheartening and involves probably four more people than necessary, even for a company that size.