Amazon Interview Experience for Data Engineer

Amazon visited our campus in July for three roles i.e.

• QAE(Quality Assurance Engineer), 
• BIE(Business Intelligence Engineer), 
• DE(Data Engineer). 

The whole process was conducted online. 246 applicants applied for Online assessment.

ONLINE ASSESSMENT: Platform: Mettl: The test was of 100 minutes in total and there was no negative marking. It consisted of 11 sections. The first section was a coding section which (in my case) was related to hashmaps and was of medium difficulty level. 
The rest of the 10 sections had 5 questions in each section and they were respectively DBMS, SQL, Computer Networks, Python Programming, Linux Commands, Pseudocodes, Software Testing, Data Visualization, Data Structures, and Algorithms. The overall difficulty level was medium. There was no such sectional timing you just have to attempt the whole paper in 100 minutes and can also switch between the sections.

Tip: Focus more on the topics which are most important for the role you want to go for.
For example: as a data engineer, you need to focus on python, DBMS, SQL, data visualization, and pseudocodes.
If you have time then prepare for all subjects/sections but if not then just focus on your role’s sections and just take care of accuracy. Also do not waste a lot of time on just one section.

Resources: gfg,w3schools, javatpoint, tutorialspoint, w3resources for SQL practice, Gate smashers, and knowledge gate playlists

After the online assessment 43 students were shortlisted. 20 for QAE, 7 for BIE, and 16 for DE. And the next phase was the interview phase consisting of three interview rounds. All were elimination rounds.

ROUND 1: (Technical): The interviewer asked questions from three sections i.e. Python programming, SQL And Project, Big Data, DBMS, etc.

Questions from DBMS, Big Data, and Project:

• Tell me something about yourself.
• What do you mean by DBMS and RDBMS?
• What's the difference between OLAP and OLTP?
• What is a data warehouse?
• You said you got interested in data engineering and analytics have you done any project related to that?
• Which algorithm did you use? Could you have another algorithm?

Questions from Python:

• Which scripting language are you familiar with?
• Check whether a string is a palindrome or not.
• Count the number of vowels in a given string
• Can you explain your code?
• What was the most complex question you did in Python? Code that

Questions from SQL:

• Create any two tables and make primary and foreign keys accordingly by providing the necessary attributes 
• Write SQL query to count the number of employees in the department
• One question on joins
• He wrote one query and asked for the output of it, can't remember properly but it was based on aggregate functions
• What’s the most complex SQL query you used? Write that

     The interview lasted for about 40-45 minutes.

ROUND 2: (Technical):

• Tell me something about yourself
• So you made a face mask detection project did you also deploy it anywhere and where did you run it?
• Follow-up in-depth questions and situational-based questions on the project
• What is the primary key?
• What's the difference between a primary key and a unique key?
• What is a composite key?
• What is normalization? And different normal forms?
• Types of joins in brief
• What is self-join?
• What is cross-join?
• Difference between star and snowflake schema
• What are fact tables?
• Any project you did at the last moment? What did you do?
• What problem did you face?

     The interview lasted for about 40-45 minutes.

ROUND 3: (Technical + Behavioral):

• Tell me something about yourself
• Explain your project
• Follow-up in-depth questions related to project
• What complex problem did you face while making the project?
• How did you solve it?
• How would you learn anything new?
• How will you learn c++ language given you don't know anything about it?
• One SQL query question of medium difficulty
• How will you check whether a linked list is circular? Follow-up questions related to that

     The interview lasted for about 40-45 minutes.

Tips:

• Speak confidently and explain everything in your best way by taking examples
• If you don't know something say you're not aware of that at that point but you're willing to learn in future
• If you have some idea about a question but you're not 100% sure then ask them if you are allowed to take a guess and then think over it and try to answer the question rather than bluntly saying I don't know
• Try to use the Amazon leadership principles in the questions 
• Interact with the interviewer, ask your doubts, confirm and discuss your approach, and try to catch the hints given by the interviewer to solve problems
• If you know other ways to code a question show or tell those approaches as well
• Write user-friendly codes and explain your code to the interviewer as well
• Most importantly be confident and present yourself in the best possible way
• Ask questions when the interviewer says do you have any questions for us. Don't just say no. 
• All the very best!

Verdict: 4 students were selected. 1 for QAE and 3 for DE. I was selected for DE.

Anonymous

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