Amazon Business Analyst Interview Guide

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.

Responsibilities

• Own the design, development, and maintenance of ongoing metrics, reports, analyses, and dashboards that monitor and drive key business decisions.
• Embed analytics into day-to-day operations by supporting and translating business inquiries to analytical reports.
• Build robust operational and business metrics and make them highly visual and consumable across the workplace.
• Work with cross-functional teams, systems, and vendor data to build reporting systems and utilize metrics to find strong improvement opportunities.

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.

• The Amazon business analyst interview is a combination of technical and business skills which combine attention to detail, logical reasoning, communication skills, as well as cultural fit and interest in the role on the team. For the cultural fit part, focus on the leadership principles above, as that really does define the culture.
• There is also usually a bar raiser brought into the interview at some point (someone not directly on the team) who can be more objective and determine long-term suitability for Amazon.
• There may be questions on product roadmaps, prioritization, and stakeholder alignment. These could come up as a how would you question instead of the typical tell me about a time when type question. For example, one question could be forecasting the run-rate, stock-up strategy, and discount-% of an Echo device for Black Friday promotions.
• A strange experience by a recent candidate was when they were asked to succinctly articulate 3 strong reasons to reject me for the role I was applying for. These questions are expected to be under 10-15% of all the interview panels combined.

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:

• Customer Obsession: Took customer feedback and learned from their pain points to build a better product or process.
• Dive Deep: Solved a complex problem by diving into the issue headfirst.
• Bias for Action: Prioritized action and initiative for different projects.
• Ownership: A project where you went beyond the original scope.
• Earn Trust: Resolving a conflict between different team members and building a good relationship with customers.
• Invent and Simplify: A project where you made a system more efficient.

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!

The most common technical questions in Amazon business analyst interviews are:

• SQL queries and ETLs
• Business case questions
• Statistical analysis
• Product metrics

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:

• How do merge upserts work?
• How can history loads be done?

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.

Amazon SQL interview 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.

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?

Hint: You can start by nailing down what fake comments are. What indicators can you list for determining if a comment on Amazon is fake or not?

Click the link above to view the detailed solution to this problem.

See more example Amazon interview questions from Interview Query:

Here’s an estimated business analyst salaries at Amazon:

Read interview experiences and salary posts in preparation for your next interview.