Amazon Data Engineer job interview

Here is what the Amazon Data Engineer interview process looked like.

Amazon Data Engineer job interview summary

How it gets started: internal referral from a former colleague.

Job Level: Mid 

Team: Alexa

Years of Experience: 4 years experience 

Degree: M.S in computer science

Offer: Yes

TC: ~260 USD

Location: Seattle, WA

Interview process: 6 weeks

Preparation: 3 months

Has a job: yes

Decide to join: N/A

Amazon Data Engineer Job Interview Round 1: recruiter chat

Basic information, most impressive project, team intro, past experience.

Amazon Data Engineer Job Interview Round 2: SQL coding

1. Write a function to return the cumulative spend of each customer (similar to SQLPad coding question #113);
2. Top 3 products vs. bottom 3 products (similar to SQLPad coding question #94)

Amazon Data Engineer Job Interview Virtual Onsite Round 1: data engineering and big data concept

1. How to debug a long-running SQL query?
2. Experience in Spark, what is sharding? How to partition data into different parquet files?
3. What python libraries have you used to work with S3? What about redshift? Have you ever used boto3?

Amazon Data Engineer Job Interview Virtual Onsite Round 2: ETL

1. Quick intro about yourself;
2. Design a data pipeline for a user report dashboard that shows the need to know top Alexa user requests by different countries every hour.

Amazon Data Engineer Job Interview Virtual Onsite Round 3: Data Modeling

1. What is star schema, what are its pros and cons?
2. What is a dimension table? What is a fact table?
3. Design the backend data house of a ridesharing app?

Amazon Data Engineer r Job Interview Virtual Onsite Round 4: leadership

1. Tell me about a time you have to meet a tight project deadline?
   • Follow up: do you have a plan b, and why?
2. Have you ever failed at a project? Tell me about your biggest failure.
   • Follow up: what would you have done differently?

Amazon Data Engineer job offer

It took about two weeks to hear back from the recruiter. Jason was initially given an oral offer, followed by a written offer shortly after a successful negotiation (10% increase on base and RSU, 15% on sign-on bonus).

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