Amazon Research Scientist Phone Interview Questions

I had a chance to got the phone interview for a research scientist role in Amazon UK (research for Alexa) before PhD gragudation. After the initial CV application, a HR person contacted me and scheduled for an interview with a researcher in the team that I've applied.

Overall, the interview process took 30 mins, and the questions are based on my research area and really delved into details to see how I describe/deliver concepts to non-technical people as well as some research questions about my research topics.


Some questions: 

• Describe CNN
• Why CNN in terms of fully connected NN
• Describe LSTM
• Why LSTM solves the vanishing gradient problem
• Why word embeddings reveal the semantic relationships (man:king- woman:queen)
• coding, there is a stream of numbers, how to find a pair of a and b which sum up to x? (failed)

Summary:

• Too much focused on the preparation of Amazon Principles, which the interviewer did not ask.
• Lack of preparation of coding
• Too nervous for the first job interview...