How did I pass the AWS job Interview and become a Technical Account Manager?
This is a personal note for those like me who have been, are or will be on their journey to become Amazon employees.
And this is not a “How to land a job in AWS in 7 basic steps” article. If you are looking for insights on this, you can start Googling and you will see there are 26,800.000 results you can choose from.
I have prepared 2 parts to save you time. If you are looking to know how I got to meet AWS and decided to become an AWS Technical Account Manager, you can start reading from Part 1. If what is important to you is what I have worked on to get ready for the job then feel free to jump to Part 2.
Part 1: How I Met Amazon Web Services
So if you remember from my previous article How Amazon Web Services Changes Your Team’s Culture (+ Bonus: Makes You Lose Weight In The Process) I have a great deal of respect for what TAMs can do and how they can affect the overall success for your company. I will get into that in this article but before let me tell you about my journey.
I met AWS for the first time in October 2017 when I joined a small startup in Girona. Having worked in giant corporations with department barriers, with way too much bureaucracy to handle I moved from Barcelona to a much smaller village which is 139km from Barcelona and started working in a startup.
Starting to work with AWS was really shocking. I am not ashamed to say that I come from a poor family. What my father had thought me, was to work hard, be humble and never ever hurt anyone. than anything else. After 20 years working in 6 different industries first as a junior system admin, then working as manager and director in various companies, finding an IAAS / PAAS provider that really excel at what they do makes me think I should have met them much before. Back in 2006, I remember the days having to go down the data center myself, putting together all the pieces of an HP server and racking it myself or calling a colleague to help me out if it was high on the rack. Only to discover that the memory module was faulty and it would take 3 weeks to get a new one.
Having your own data center was great until I have discovered that you could only have only so much of servers in it. When I found myself doing a Tetris to find a better racking mechanism so that I could finally add my new server to the datacenter I knew it was time to find a better way. And you guessed it! It was virtualisation.
Starting virtualising with VMWare 4 and getting 2 clusters of 4 servers each working, the problem was solved until we realised that it took still a huge amount of maintenance. Also, we were limited with the budget, size of the cluster and the size of the rackable servers. So I wish then I met AWS.
Going fast forward to Oct 2017, I started working with AWS. Managing a team of 5 DevOps, 240 ec2 instances, 15+ RDS instances, millions of lambda executions centered in 2 Regions and multiple availability zones it felt just as it would, having tens of data centers to your service in any region you want that you could start any service you want.
Bare with me I’ll tie everything up…
As for the type of person, I am who likes a lot to help out others and as I needed to be able to complete my job functions as manager/director I always had worked in between teams, directors, managers and other people.
What I found with time that in order to help others the best thing I could do was to focus on the ways I could bring the most value to the table. Being an ego centric boss or creating hierarchies for me were out of the game from the beginning.
So I did the best thing I could do. Find my strong points and canalize them to get things done. After about 4 years, tens of pages of notes, quite a bit of book, Ted talks, podcasts I knew not only what my strong points were I also was aware of the ones that I was not good at. So I focused on how I could help using the strong points.
- Communicate transparently: Being able to enable the information flow between management, technical teams, and people. This is a very critical aspect that needs to be done correctly and in a timely manner. Believing that I did/do spend a great amount of deliberate time in making sure the projects, tasks, success, and failure are communicated between people, between management and technical teams.
- Talk the same language, understand and translate different teams: Being able to sit down with my team and talk about the use of systemd and why to prefer it over init and go up to a C level executive and explain this and the benefits of this in business in the next years’ budget.
- Enable: I am a team person and I believe teamwork above all personal achievements. The best way to help the team is to enable others to do their jobs better. This can be anything. From bringing a cup of tea to a team member because it is late at night and you need to finish this project by tomorrow, to find the necessary budget for your team member to get educated and pay for his exam.
- Unblock: This what I believe what a leader/people manager, amongst all other things, is supposed to do. Unblocking bureaucracy, waits, problems, issues you name it. Once done correctly this alone brings so much help to your teams and the people forming that team.
- Organize: I am a great fan of letting people do more of what they excel at , which brings the most value to the business and not bugging them with other things. Most of the time I had to lead very analytical, problem-solving teams who excel at technical depths but also regarded communicating and/or organizing a burden trying to save more time for the technical problems. Since I really enjoy communicating and organizing I took this duty to take this burden off my teams and get things done.
I needed to talk about all these, not to claim I do a great job myself but it struck me how closely related they were with AWS 14 leadership principles.
So I went down really deep in order to understand them better. At first, they might look a couple of words you can frame and hang to your office wall but getting to know more about them, the history of Amazon and talking to other people assured me they were so important for Amazon and the Amazonians. (Seems there was no Amazonians page in Wikipedia. So I did submit a new page where we can comment on what makes an Amazonian, an Amazonian).
Then there was this. I have been a people manager for so long and I am very comfortable in creating, mentoring, enabling multicultural teams distributed in different locations. I had been a Director of Site Reliability Engineering leading the DevOps side of things for a fashion brand so why in the earth would I?
Well, the answer was clear to me really. I am a hard believer that what is important is not the number of direct or indirect reports you have, it is actually how big, useful and ethical impact you can make. Although I love managing people I realized TAM and the type of work I always did was really quite similar. Some of them I found were:
- Working in between teams
- Get in-depth data and give visibility
- Focus on future and long term solutions rather than quick and dirty ones
- Making sure clients have quick/effective solutions
- Make sure everything is up and running
- Communicate with different groups, people and customers transparently
- Find new and effective solutions to existing or incoming problems
- Create processes that enable customers to grow
- Get things done
- Unblock the bureaucracy that may exist
- Ability to talk to a wide range of teams and people and being able to talk to their language, understand their perspective and create solutions.
*If there are other TAMs reading this please feel free to comment on what other qualities you bring to the companies here!
Finally, I had worked as an Enterprise Support Client. I worked with my Technical Account Manager for 1.5 years hand in hand getting many projects done one after another. I could see how TAMs worked, what values, benefits they brought to the companies.
The more I read the more I felt identified with these leadership principles & role of the TAMs. Then on a winter night, I did click the “Apply Now” button for Senior Amazon Technical Manager role based in Barcelona.
Part 2: How did I pass the AWS interview?
So before anything else, if you are looking for tips and tricks on how to pass AWS interviews, the internet is full of with them. I do not believe you should work only to pass an interview, as I do not believe you should try to pass an exam just to pass it. For me, it is always a journey and what you learn on the way is really really valuable that you should make the most of it know yourself, your limits and where are you heading to.
After I clicked the send button for the open position it was time to really know in depth what I was supposed to know vs what I thought I did. I started with this very small introduction to what TAM role was:
Then I digging a little bit deeper I came across (Actually then the Amazon HR would send this link to me as an example) the following youtube video where I could really hear a TAM talking about the job they do and her experiences. I strongly suggest you take a cup of coffee and spare an hour to listen to this:
Meanwhile, I have received the first communications from Amazon HR giving me a preview of what the procedure looked like and what I was going to be asked during this first phone interview. Going through all these materials in the mail that my recruiter sent me was essential. I knew it was going to be a technical interview but I didn’t really know what the person on the other side of the phone was testing me for. Then my phone interview date was confirmed. It was time to get to work!
I started refreshing my knowledge on Amazon itself. Since I had passed 3 AWS Exams Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect and Developer exams recently I didn’t need to start from the beginning. I would go over to each of the exams for a couple of days, refresh my memory and go back to Whizlabs to take all the exams one by one. Getting up at 05.00h in the morning and studying until 07.00h and continuing 20.00h — 22.00h seemed like a great way for me to get all these done in quiet.
Not only that but I also knew I would be asked questions about the fundamentals of computers, internet, and technologies. So I started to revise my old CCNA skills go down into TCP handshakes, OSI layers, and the protocols.
I woke up early in the morning of the interview but didn’t touch any material for not confusing myself.
It was done. I had finished my first one-hour interview with a Senior TAM.
Now you may think I was jumping in the air with happiness, then you are wrong. It was an unbelievably tense experiment for me where I was asked questions much deeper than I knew. Questions were well formed and it was always about going into deeper and deeper into what you were asked. I was able to respond to most of the questions with great confidence and others I had to say I did not know. And yes! You don’t know a lot of things.!
Then instead of losing time I actually took note of what I was asked and dedicated another two hours to understand the concepts behind them. Some of them were the technologies we use every day but never went too deep in to understand the inner workings and the others were concepts I would hear from developers and never touched. There I had my notes and I now knew them.
IT took 7 days of silence and then came this:
Now it was time to get happy! But not that happy because I had a new interview to get ready for.
Now it was time to dig very deep into Amazon’s 14 leadership principles. Meanwhile, I didn’t stop revisiting my technical notes I was working %95 of the time in understanding every principle and researching my past projects to see if I was able to act according to them. After studying them one by one and trying to find better examples of how I was able to demonstrate these principles the result was this:
I had filled out one of my favorite A3 notebooks, was filling a new one out and intentionally throwing the pages out to hang to my wall so that I could see them every day and remember what I had done.
One of the hardest things to do was to remember if / when asked about these. Having worked in many companies and faced so many situations finding the right example and remembering it really needed attention.
Then came the day of the second phone interview. I took the phone and it was my manager on the phone. I must say having studied that much and finding out a comforting voice on the phone was great. It didn’t mean the interview was going to be easy, but it helped me to relax a lot.
We went into details, a lot of them. It didn’t feel like an interview, rather a long talk that lasted 1 hour about the things I have done but more importantly How and Whys of them.
It was over. My manager explained to me I would hear from them either a good or not so good answer in a couple of days. so It was time to wait.
Then in a couple of days came this:
I was happy, but I knew there was an even harder, really the hardest interview in the process waiting for me. So it was time to continue getting ready for it.
I continued studying technical notes. Took great attention to learn and dive deep into questions that I was not able to answer during the first interview and continued digging deeper into 14 leadership principles, studying them and categorizing my achievements in a way that I could fit them in an A4 that I could take them with me during the on-site interview.
I was extra happy to see that it was not a problem to bring a couple of notes. More than anything this would help me to be able to give different examples to each of the people that would interview me.
I really really wanted to understand the AWS technologies before the on-site interview so I started studying for a new AWS exam. If you remember I had passed Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect and Developer exams. Now it was time to study for the AWS Certified Sysops Administrator.
And I did. Getting up at 05.00 every day and studying from 06.00- 13.00, 16.00–20.00h in the weekends I took the exam in PUE Barcelona, where I actually took all my other exams. The result was this:
Now I was ready!
If you are familiar with this process you will know that you are interviewed by 5 different people or groups of people who are testing your skills on the selected leadership principles and technical skills over the period of 5–6 hours. Here is a short guide on AWS On-Site-Interviews:
It was the day. I had studied everything I could. I had taken time to create one A4 paper with all my projects that I worked on in different companies, printed 2 copies of my resume and printed the interview guide just to have a look just before the interview:
During the day I met my manager, 2 other technical account managers, one Amazonian from the Alexa voice team and finally my manager’s manager.
I would be asked questions on my work experience diving deeper and deeper into WHY and HOW instead of just staying in the high level of WHAT I had done.
TAMs would ask me questions on leadership principles but with them, we went into detailed technical discussions. With one of the TAMs, I worked on a high availability architecture on the blackboard drawing and adding the necessary services. Again we would go into very details on WHY and HOW.
It was 16.00 o’clock, I had finished my last interview. It was hard but somehow I was not tired. I actually had enjoyed the interviewers, their questions and the possibility to ask them questions (Every interviewer would leave 10 minutes to answer my questions), I didn’t think it was a hard day of the interview.
My manager and my one of the TAMs that interviewed came to get me and helped me out of the building. My manager told me they would let me know either a positive or not so positive answer in a couple of days.
I got my car and start driving towards Torroella De Montgri.
6 days later came the news with these words on it:
I was accepted!
Now I was really happy. I was so happy to be accepted to AWS that’s for sure but I was also happy to see that I was able to get ready correctly, I was able to answer all my manager’s, and my colleague’s questions, I was happy to have achieved something that was so important to me.
Really I would describe this as a one-time opportunity to get to know yourself on what you can do and a chance to dive deep into subjects that you have never had time to.
I am sure there are a lot of you who were in the same position as me, who are currently getting ready or who have successfully passed the interview process. If you are going through the interview process or you will apply for a job in AWS before anything else take time and mentally get yourself ready for this awesome time you will have to broaden your knowledge and finding more about what you can do.
I will be starting in AWS Barcelona on 20.05.2019. I am sure there are a lot of bigger challenges ahead, and I know there will be hard times but I am also sure I will enjoy every bit of it!
Good luck to all of you who are applying for a job in AWS!
Don’t forget to make it a journey to learn and broaden yourself!
Need help deciding? Join our Technical Account Managers community in Discord. Feel free to contact me via Twitter or LinkedIn.
Wonder what it is like to work in AWS and what does Technical Account Managers do? Read it here in my new article:
Update: As of March 2020 I got promoted to be the new Head of Enterprise Support for Spain & Portugal. I am currently managing a Golden Army of Technical Account Managers serving our customers.
If you like to know more about me:
If you haven’t yet read here are other articles that will help you:
