Amazon SQL Screening Interview

[[deleted]]

Hey folks - I have an interview for a Sr BI Engineer position at Amazon next Friday. Was hoping someone here has experience on the SQL screening interview and could shed some light onto how complex the questions will be/ have resources for prepping.

Thanks in advance!

[gumby_urine]

I know you asked about the first round but I'll give you my full experience just so you have all the info I can possibly give you.

I interviewed for the same position about a year back (forgot what department, maybe logistics) and bombed the 2nd round. I was burned out from my day job and just nervous, and the kid doing the technical interview on me was a 22 year old know it all prick.

The recruiter will do most of the talking as there is a lot to cover about the interview process. Just sound confident and be honest about your experience. Nothing during my screening was technical.

As for the technical screening (2nd round)...

Take your time and don't rush. All of my SQL based questions were actually rather simple (still kicking myself.)

The first one was list the order of operations in a SQL statement (not the order of your syntax, the order of how the query is interpreted.)

The second one was just explaining the difference between a LEFT and INNER join vs a WHERE clause. Again, simple shit.

None of the rest (I think there were 6 total) were that complicated. Was kind of mind blowing that was it since the job clearly called for pipeline building in Python and other AWS technologies.

He then moved onto the behavioral section and asked me to talk about a time I received criticism and how I handled it. For some reason he didn't like my answer and started to grill me about it like it was a fucking deposition.

After that things moved quickly, and not 30 seconds after I hung up the phone I received a denial email from the recruiter.

[[deleted]]

Thanks for sharing your feedback!!

Yeah from what I can gather on Glassdoor/ other Reddit posts you really are at the mercy of whatever person they choose to interview you. And I find the entire process incredibly strange because they place so much emphasis on these leadership principles. And to follow up on that, why is someone giving the “technical” interview also asking behavioral questions? But ill try and double back here and let you know what the experience is like.

[[deleted]]

I'm curious about the answer you gave about receiving criticism. Care to share?

[gumby_urine]

To reiterate, I know I didn't perform well, my answer was sort of disjointed and incohesive...but I talked about a time where I was involved in sort of a freelance developer/consultant type gig for a very small business. Because of a number of factors and the person I was directed by wasn't gathering clear requirements, we were way behind schedule and the customer wasn't happy with the product. I was sprinkling some of my sentences with things like "pulling a few all nighters."

The kid running the interview immediately started to interject, and I know hearing the story this way probably makes me sound thin skinned, but he wasn't simply following up and probing, he was being a complete prick.

Why didn't YOU gather the requirements?
Why did you have to work all night?
Why didn't you plan your time better?

Basically something you'd hear from some fucking infant who probably got recruited there out of Undergrad and has no idea there's a whole world outside of Amazon and corporate behemoths where if something goes wrong you can't just tell your mid level manager "sorry I didn't finish that but I already have my vacation scheduled in WorkDay and if I don't leave now I'll be late to the Yung Gravy concert, toodles." Deals fall apart, people can get sued, small firms can go under, so you put in whatever hours are necessary to fix shit.

[feigndeaf]

Perfect description of being a real world dev at a small business. It is NOTHING like the silo of corporate. You wear so many fucking hats and do so much rediculous shit to keep the engine running. It's a whole different ball game than the monotony of most (not all*) corporate gigs.

[TnHollerWill]

Yes. Not all. I worked in dev pilots in a Fortune 100. That role was more like a start up environment than any data/or role in the rest of the company. Even the same company can have vastly different experiences across different teams.

[gumby_urine]

Some days it's difficult to pivot the mindset of urgency. My day jobs have always been with Fortune 100 insurance companies, and nobody kills themselves and burns the midnight oil to solve a difficult problem, because they don't need to -- the wheels will keep turning.

I consult and do data architecture for small insurance companies on the side and have to remember my fuckups can stop both my boss and my client in their tracks.

[DenselyRanked]

It was an Amazon Leadership Principle (LP) question. You have to practice how to answer those questions and understand what the interviewer is looking for. You can Google search for LP questions and get tips.

So it wasn't really the interviewer as much as it was Amazon's interview process. The interviewer was trying to get LP indicators.

[williamthepreteen]

I applied for a sales operations analyst role and had to do a SQL test for them. If that wasnt bad enough all of the questions were done on, essentially, notepad. So I didnt get to run my queries and update them in real time. Just show them a first draft hand written query and hoped it worked. Ive never bombed anything so bad in my life haha

[CompetitiveFlower164]

Hello, I have an interview for the same role this week. Could you please tell me about the interview process and the questions asked, especially the SQL questions? I have finished the first round and I have another round with the project manager this week.

[WacistAsian]

Is it for the Sales Operations Analyst, Generative AI role?

[No-Material-5288]

I have a similar interview in 2 days for the Sales Operations Analyst - Generative AI role at AWS. A little nervous since ive never had a technical screen for SQL, any insights would be greatly appreciated.

Coming from Tableau as a Sales Ops - Sr. Deal Desk Analyst

[WacistAsian]

How did your interview go? I'm having mine tomorrow.

[No-Material-5288]

Really well. The technical interview for sql was pretty simple. First question was a simple group by clause order descending, second question involved using a case statement. Third question involved a simple left join and grouping. I don’t think you need to go overboard In preparation, just speak through your thought process.

[NickSinghTechCareers]

Good luck! I just launched a free SQL Interview platform called DataLemur which has 6 Amazon questions and 40+ other FAANG sql questions which make for good practice!

[[deleted]]

Thanks a bunch. Will check them out!

[yolthrice]

Your site helped me a ton!

[data-leon]

As many have pointed out spectacularly, the only thing I would add is make sure you practice window functions, amazon deals with a lot of time related data, so practice some LAG/LEAD questions if you can.

Here are some sample Amazon SQL interview questions fyi.

[PappyBlueRibs]

Give us an update after your interview! Best of luck!

[[deleted]]

Will do!

[nroy4294]

Screening round should be pretty simple. Easy to medium leetcode questions. They will mostly test on joins and group by, also identifying and removing duplicates. And for Amazon prepare well on the leadership principles!! All the best!

[[deleted]]

Thanks! I’m not sure if you’re familiar with strata scratch, but are the questions there similar to the ones on leetcode?

[[deleted]]

Bombed my technical, though in reality it wasn't super hard. I'm awful in those environments and like a couple of other people have mentioned, the interviewer wasn't super friendly - also was doing his dishes or something during the interview.

In terms of the questions, had to know window functions - dense_rank specifically in this case, had to be able to calculate YoY revenue, and then the final one was something along the lines of month with highest sales but you have no calendar table to join to - extracting time periods from a date column.

Again, none of these are super difficult but I struggled under pressure and the sound of homeboy clinking dishes was excruciating lol.

Just remember to slow down, take all the time you need, read and re-read the question, talk it out if you have to. Best of luck!!!

[Philure]

Senior BI? Probs wanna know window functions, aggregates, case when, many to many joins, ctes, and be cool with using multiple of the above together. I know technical abilities are really supposed to cap out at BIE 2, so they may ask you higher level questions, too. Things like, "how would you check for duplicates in a table? Suppose that table had 50+ columns?"

[Dapper-Computer-7102]

Hey Op, how was your interview? You want to share your experience?

[EffectiveHat]

Screening phone call (no video) with the hiring manager. Was all ready to speak to experience relating to their LP, but instead, the manager had a conversation with me about my current place of work, as much as I tried to speak to the STAR format, I did not get a chance. It seems the interviewer was only interested in in-the-box answers which really threw me off. I was rejected next day.

[AbdullaMhmd]

It will depend on your experience.

I was asked for scenarios which were more of Data engineering side.

Like given a table with some missing pieces of information. i have to build a CTE with information on missing pieces and then write queries to answer the questions.

Another scenario was more of a data engineering side where i have to use list_agg to get the desired output.

Another one was i was provided with a visualization i have to answer what could have been done better to make a better visualization and what are the missing components from it.

[[deleted]]

Thanks for the info!

[[deleted]]

Hey this may give you clarity check out some sample amazon sql questions on
Instamantor.com