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Historical candidate account, 2020–2021. The timeline and outcome below describe Lisa’s reported experience. They do not establish Amazon’s current process, typical search duration, or the effect of coaching on an offer.
It was June 2020. Lisa had just graduated a month ago and was still enjoying her break.
She had graduated from a California state university and was planning to join a startup in San Francisco as a data scientist. The original account gave conflicting descriptions of her degree, so we have omitted the degree label rather than choose one.
One week before her original start date, she got a call from the startup’s HR, who told her, unfortunately, due to Covid, their budget was cut, and her role got canceled.
It was a rather frustrating experience, to say at least, let alone it was meant to be Lisa’s first job, and she had never experienced anything like that in her life.
Feeling embarrassed, Lisa kept her head down for about a month. Then, towards the end of August, she decided to get herself up and give the job search another try.
In the next six months, she applied for hundreds of jobs, talked to many companies, got into several final rounds of interviews, but still no offer.
She didn’t stop. Instead of just sitting there, she went to the internet, tried her best to learn what’s needed to land a job, and reached out to us at instamentor through a friend.
After preparation and interviews, Lisa reported receiving an Amazon offer in June 2021.
At the time of the original account, she expected to start two weeks later as an entry-level Business Intelligence Engineer.
TLDR
Candidate: Lisa
Joined instamentor.com: Feb 2021
YoE: 0 (fresh graduate)
Offer: Yes
Reported historical compensation: approximately US$120,000. The account did not separate base pay, equity, or bonuses, and the figure has not been independently verified; it is not a current salary benchmark.
Location: Seattle, WA
Timeline
Feb 2021: submitted application at amazon.com
March 2021: started coaching on instamentor.com
April 2021: talked to HR and scheduled the first two rounds of technical interviews.
May 2021: final round of interview
June 2021: verbal offer, negotiation, and final signed offer.
Here is a list of sample questions we practiced during our mock interviews, and according to Lisa, it has been super helpful for her preparations.
Similar questions had been asked during her actual amazon interviews.
Statistics:
- How to explain the p-value to non-technical people?
- What are the assumptions for a two-sample t-test?
Leadership/Behavioral questions:
- Tell me about yourself;
- Most innovative project;
- Biggest failure;
- Most proud project, how did you collect its requirements, given a chance to do again, what would you have done differently.
- One example of customer obsession;
- One example of dealing with conflict;
- One example of bias towards action;
Data/Technical:
- SQL window functions: row_number, lead/lag;
- Difference between subquery and join;
- Experience with data visualization, tableau;
- How to determine if a product should amazon offer as a subscription service? Write a SQL query to find those products.
Practice the reasoning behind the questions
For a subscription-product question, state the decision rule before writing SQL: which purchases count, what repeat-purchase window matters, and whether refunds or missing customer identifiers affect the result. Validate the answer with customers who buy once, repeatedly, and on the window boundary.
Explain a p-value as a probability of results at least as extreme as those observed, under the null model and its assumptions; it is not the probability that the null hypothesis is true. For a two-sample test, discuss independence and the assumptions of the specific test you choose. For behavioral answers, separate what the team did from your contribution and describe a result you can substantiate.
