The Amazon business analyst role is a mix of technical data interpretation and business acumen. A successful business analyst at Amazon will move into a career path of product management, analytics management, or business intelligence, all of which require depth and width of knowledge.
The Amazon business analyst interview process is extremely consistent across the different teams. Once your resume is shortlisted, the interview starts with a recruiter screening or phone screen with a hiring manager. Then, if selected in those initial rounds, you are invited for an interview loop of around 4-5 interviews on the same day. The interviews are based on Amazon’s 14 leadership principles to test your competency and may include technical interview questions.
Overall the breakdown in terms of focus in preparation should be mainly on leadership principles, a little bit on database system design, and lastly on actually coding, SQL queries, and product and business cases.
Based on the level (L3/L4/L5), you will have 4-5 rounds in person. Out of these, there will be a couple of technical rounds and a couple of behavioral rounds. Behavioral rounds will be mostly to judge you on the notorious leadership principles of Amazon.
Interested in how the business analyst interview differs at Google? See our guide to the Google business analyst interview.
For Amazon’s leadership behavioral competency interview, the exact phrasing of the question may be different, but the central idea remains the same between each leadership principle.
For each leadership principle, remember to craft a story around how you exemplified each one of these principles. For example:
The interviewer will never state that they’re asking you a leadership principles type question. Yet know exactly how to craft a story that leads to one of the fourteen principles. It’s basically the elephant in the room!
In the Amazon Business Analyst interview process, the most commonly tested skills are in SQL, Analytics and Product Metrics.
The most common technical questions in Amazon business analyst interviews are:
At least 1 to 2 rounds will be based on technical skills. For business analysts, the main skill set they are testing for is SQL, although it helps to know a little bit of Python, R, or data visualization tools like Tableau. Expect to see some easy to medium-level SQL questions on Interview Query. There are also elements of data engineering such as raw data extraction, transformation, and loading data. Practice some easy to medium-level SQL questions on Interview Query.
Generally, business analysts will also write some ETL pipelines, so it helps to brush up on key concepts. This will depend on the team and whether they expect business analyst’s to write ETL pipelines or not.
Example ETL questions would be like:
Check out this mock interview on how a candidate answers a data engineering and ETL problem given by Amazon.
Amazon has moved almost completely to AWS internally, so it will be good if you possess some AWS knowledge, especially the services related to databases. Additionally, understanding how Redshift works should be beneficial in terms of SQL syntax that the interviewer will likely be familiar with.
SQL questions will revolve around your understanding of the basic SQL logic like JOIN conditions using multiple datasets and how to calculate averages, max, min, sums, and other functions.
Refresh yourself working with multiple datasets, creating new tables off of the given data, and creating a summarized output.
Learn more about the Amazon SQL Interview Questions here.
Python and R are more advanced tools that are not required but will make your candidacy stand out. Most teams will rely on a data engineer for their Python needs and a data scientist to utilize R for statistical analytics. Knowing these skills will make you more valuable as an Amazon business analyst.
Additionally, the most common other technical questions to encounter are statistical analysis, consulting-style business case questions, and product insight generation, which is interpreting the impact of trends on a business. Expect some case-type questions in these tech rounds, questions like measurement and tracking of a particular performance metric or automation of leadership reporting dashboards. These questions are common problem strategy type questions.
Example Question:
You are tasked with flagging users who post fake comments on Amazon to give to the modeling team for further analysis. How would you initially filter users who post fake comments on Amazon?
See a step-by-step solution for this question on Interview Query. Hint: Start by nailing down what fake comments are. What indicators can you list for determining if a comment on Amazon is fake or not?
Here’s an estimated business analyst salaries at Amazon:
Average Base Salary
Average Total Compensation
Read interview experiences and salary posts in preparation for your next interview.
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