I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Chicago, IL) in Aug 2022
Interview
I applied online in August 2022, the full process lasted 5 weeks.
I was contacted 2 days after my application to schedule a phone screen with the recruiter. This call was very high-level, mostly trying to confirm that I understood the job posting and that I actually had the skills/experience mentioned in my application and resume. We discussed the salary range for the role to confirm it matched my expectations.
Next step was a 1 hour interview with a Senior BIE on the hiring team. The breakdown was 30 minutes of live-coding (SQL only) and 30 minutes of standard behavioral interview questions where they expect answers in STAR format and that your answers tie back to the Amazon leadership principles.
The final round "loop" interviews consisted of 5 1-hour interviews that were a mix of technical of behavioral questions. The technical questions consisted of both live-coding exercises and more case-type questions. There are a TON of behavioral interview questions, and each interviewer was tasked with focusing their questions around 2-3 leadership principles. Toward the 4th and 5th interviews I felt like I hadn't prepared enough examples and did end up reiterating examples I had given to previous interviewers - I would avoid this if possible but as long as you make sure to tailor the examples to the specific question you should be fine.
Be aware - each interviewer will take diligent notes and likely ask you a series of clarifying questions for every example you give. Don't let this throw you off - they just want to make sure they fully understand your experiences and help guide you to the type of information they're looking for.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about a time where you had to choose between multiple solutions to a problem.
Tell me about a time where you went above and beyond for a customer
Have you ever had an experience where you proposed a solution that you faced resistance in implementing?
Have you ever had an experience where you didn't know how to solve a problem?
Say your are ingesting near real-time data from JSON outputs, how would you set up the process to optimize both read and write from your destination table?
Write a SQL query to return the top 2 customers with highest sales volume for each product from a sample dataset/tables
Write a SQL query to return only customers who ordered both Product A and B but not Product C from a sample dataset/tables
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Sep 2022
Interview
The recruiter reached out through LinkedIn and scheduled the first interview with him.
After being approved in this first step, he sent me an email with instructions for the SQL + 2 leadership principles interview.
The process was online through Amazon Chime and with the camera off.
A lot of behavioral questions to be answered with STAR Method.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
First Interview (With the recruiter):
- Ask to pass through my resume.
- How I get requirements, with which frequency, and what I ask for.
- Size of the data I'm used to work.
- Estathistical knowledge I used and scripting language (Python, R)
- How to use lead and lag function and aggregations functions.
- A time when I worked with a business area, who are they, what was the problem, what was the solution, and which was the quantitative result.
- A time when I had to dive deep to discover the root cause of a problem.
Second Interview (SQL + Leadership Principles):
- When I reached a goal, and exceed it.
-When I delivered a project under a tight timeline.
- When I got negative feedback and what I did with it
- Three things that I do to improve my overall effectiveness.
- Amazon wants to flag clients who bought Alexas and Books to send them campaigns to the next Kindle version. What I expected to find in terms of data (which tables and which fields). Then I had to use those tables and create a query to bring the client_id of those clients.
Applied to new grad role
1st Round Technical Screener
2nd Round Amazon Loop: Supposed to be 4 back to back rounds but the first interviewer no-showed. Emailed the coordinator and was notified that loop was shortened to 3 rounds.
Last round was bar raiser, went into very specific details on every question.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is your top 3 technical skills? How would you rate your SQL skills out of 5?