Getting the job — Amazon

6 min readSep 8, 2020

Disclaimer: Opinions are my own and I am not representing Amazon in any way

One of the great things about the internet is that there are so many resources out there to help you. These resources have helped me in everything from fitness to starting a business. The internet serves as an equalizer to knowledge and opportunity. This is my small contribution back to the larger internet community to help those who are in the job market and interested in working at Amazon.

Why Amazon
The Overall Process
Prep for Behavioral Questions
Prep for Technical Questions
Additional Materials

Why Amazon?

Not only is this likely to be a question that comes up during interviews, this is a great place to center yourself for the recruiting process overall. Amazon is known for having a high-performance culture. You get both the joy and the burden of ownership at Amazon. Make sure this is the culture you want to be a part of and you have a good answer to “why Amazon” both for yourself and for the interviews.

“You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three” — Jeff Bezos

The Interview Process

The process is essentially what is listed on the website. Apply Online->Phone Interview->”In-Person” Interview. In the Covid era, your in-person interview will most likely be over Chime, Amazon’s video conferencing tool.

Applying

I highly recommend applying via a referral if you know someone at Amazon. Another method is to try and find members of the hiring team on LinkedIn and set up an informal call. The second approach is what worked for me.

Amazon has thousands of jobs open ranging from Content Production to Software Engineering. During my search, I focused on jobs in Business Intelligence. You should select whatever job family you’re interested in. Next, filter based on the locations you’d like to work at. I also recommend sorting on the top right by “Most recent” so you are looking at the latest postings.

Entry level roles typically require 3–5 years of experience and senior roles typically require 5–7 years of experience.

Amazon has one of the easiest application processes I’ve encountered. All you have to do is submit your resume and answer some questions. No need to reenter all your education and employer experiences like with some other companies :)

Feel free to apply to multiple job postings if you think it will be a good fit. Even though they may all be a part of the same job family, different postings roll up to different teams and recruiters. So, the more teams that see your resume, the more likely you’ll find a mutually good fit.

Application Status

Once you’ve applied, here are the different application statuses you’ll see on the job portal.

Application submitted — The default status
Under Consideration — A recruiter has reviewed your application and you are under consideration to move to the next round (phone interview, panel interview, etc)
No Longer Under Consideration — You are no longer under consideration for the role. Doesn’t mean you can’t apply to other ones!
Hired — Congrats!

Phone Interview

My phone interview was with a manager on the hiring team. This interview consisted of tell me about yourself, 2 behavioral questions, and the opportunity for me to ask questions about the team and role.

Panel Interview

The final interview day consisted of five interviews that were 45 minutes each. 1 with a bar raiser, 3 with the hiring and extended team, and 1 with the technical team (you may or may not have a technical interview based on the role you are applying for). In each interview I was asked multiple behavioral questions. The technical interview consisted of SQL questions and then a behavioral question. If you are applying for an engineering role, you can expect technical questions from each interviewer. Each interview consisted of only one interviewer.

The Leadership Principles & Behavioral Questions

Amazon is a pretty decentralized company. The 14 Leadership Principles (LPs) is the cultural glue that holds all the disparate teams together. You are expected to know, understand, and tie the answers to behavioral questions back to these principles. You will be asked behavioral questions no matter what job family you are applying to. I highly recommend reading the first article on this list, which provides a perspective on the LPs from Dave Anderson, an Amazonian who has interviewed hundreds of candidates.

Strategy

Questions

The questions asked will vary, but they will typically follow the format of “Tell me about a time when you….”. The idea is that what you did in the past is a strong indicator of what you will do in the future, and Amazon wants to get an idea of how you operate and approach problems. Here is another video by Dan that provides specific examples of questions you may encounter.

While prepping, I tried to keep my answers around 2 minutes long. Also be prepared for follow up questions from the interviewer.

Frameworks

Below are two frameworks to structure your answers for behavioral questions.

Personal Contribution

Be sure to talk about what YOU did, not the “team”. This can be a bit difficult since culturally we are encouraged to share in the praise, but during the interview you need to focus on your personal contributions. It can still be something great that the team did, but how did YOU contribute or make an impact?

Metrics

Amazon is a data driven company. Be sure to include relevant metrics on your resume as well as during interview questions.

Tools for Prepping

Below are a few tools/mechanisms I used to support my preparation. Generally, the idea is to look at your current and past experiences and think about how you displayed the Amazon LPs in your role.

Flash Cards — Behavioral Question on one side, your STAR answer on the other. I had ~30 of these prepared.
LP Mapping Template — Powerpoint template to track examples you can give for each of the LPs
Practice, Practice, Practice — Get out the flash cards and practice. I also recorded myself practicing so I could review my answers and make improvements.

I was asked at least 12 behavioral questions over the course of my interview process. Only two or so of those were ones I had actually prepared for, but by being very familiar with the LPs and with different experiences from my career, it was relatively straight forward to answer these “new” questions on the fly.

Technical Questions

If you are applying for a technical/engineering role, be prepared to answer coding questions.

Below I am going to outline what I used to prep for Business Analyst/Business Intelligence roles. If you are on the software engineering side of the world, here is a great guide developed by John Washam, an Amazonian. John’s guide has been used by thousands of people to prep for software engineering roles.

Prep for Business Intelligence Roles

The technical portion of the interview consisted of exercises where I needed to write SQL queries to answer questions with a given dataset. The focus is going to be on analytical/reporting queries. Make sure you know joins, group by, case, CTE, window functions, etc.

It’s important to simulate the interview environment when preparing for technical questions. Even though I did all of the Database LeetCode questions 4 times (~460 questions total), I fumbled on the very first question and missed parts of other questions. But, by thinking out loud and talking about my approach, my interviewers got a sense of my competency. To best prepare yourself, try to do some practice sessions with friends in which they pose a LeetCode style question and you work through it as if it were the actual interview.

Resources for Learning

Resources for Practicing

Lore

Here are some additional resources that speak to the culture and history of Amazon.