The Amazon business analyst role is an intricate blend of technical data interpretation and business acumen.
A successful business analyst at Amazon often progresses into a career path in product management, analytics management, or business intelligence. Each of these paths demands both depth and breadth of knowledge, a crucial aspect to consider when preparing for Amazon Business Analyst interview questions.
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 interview questions. Behavioral rounds will be mostly to judge you on the notorious leadership principles of Amazon.
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!
Here are some sample questions for this category.
1. How would you convey insights and the methods you use to a non-technical audience?
3. Describe an analytics experiment that you designed. How were you able to measure success?
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:
4. How do merge upserts work?
5. 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:
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?
Write a query to create a new table, named flight routes, that displays unique pairs of two locations.
Example:
Duplicate pairs from the flights table, such as Dallas to Seattle and Seattle to Dallas, should have one entry in the flight routes table.
flights
table
Column | Type |
---|---|
id |
INTEGER |
source_location |
STRING |
destination_location |
STRING |
With this question, you’re provided a table that contains data about products that a user purchased. Products are divided into categories. The column id is the primary key of table products and represents the order in which the products are purchased.
This SQL question involves calculating the average number of downloads for free and paid accounts, broken down by day. The two tables involved are accounts and downloads. The goal is to find the average downloads for accounts that have had at least one download, and then distinguish between free and paying accounts.
This SQL question requires calculating the percentage of total revenue generated during the first and last years recorded in a table, rounding the percentages to two decimal places. The goal is to determine how much of the company’s total revenue to date was made during these specific years.
Here’s an estimated business analyst salaries at Amazon:
Average Base Salary
Average Total Compensation