Amazon is known for its love for data and has a metrics-driven culture. Business Intelligence Engineers play a crucial role in identifying relevant data, analyzing it, and providing data-driven insights. In this article, we will learn more about the responsibilities of an Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer (BIE).
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Through this article, we’ll discuss:
- What does Amazon seek in Business Intelligence Engineer candidates?
- What does the role of an Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer entail?
- What’s it like to be a Business Intelligence Engineer at Amazon?
- Minimum qualifications for the Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer position
- Tips to be an efficient Business Intelligence Engineer at Amazon
- Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer interview questions
- Average salary of an Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer
- FAQs on Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer
What Does Amazon Seek in Business Intelligence Engineer Candidates?
Amazon seeks professionals who can identify valuable data and analyze it well within a limited time, to provide crucial data-driven insights and solutions. Technically, someone with statistical and data modeling skills who knows their data analytics tools and how to use them would be preferred.
Behaviorally, Amazon actively seeks candidates who are aligned well with Amazon’s leadership principles.
What Does the Role of an Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer Entail?
Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer is a cross-functional job. As a Business Intelligence Engineer at Amazon, you’ll likely work with professionals like business leaders, product managers, data scientists, and data engineers. As a Business Intelligence Engineer, Amazon expects you to work well with people in different roles.
The role of an Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer involves:
- Giving routine data-driven updates to leaders and teams about the state of the business
- Developing automated solutions that help employees look up the data and insights they need in a convenient and understandable way
- Answering any ad hoc data-related queries from leaders or other teams
What’s It Like to Be a Business Intelligence Engineer at Amazon?
Typically, as a Business Intelligence Engineer at Amazon, you are most likely to be involved in some combination of the following tasks:
Make Data Accessible
As a Business Intelligence Engineer, your job goes beyond just working on ad hoc data requests. Your job is to make relevant data and meaningful insights available to people as conveniently as possible without needing additional input from you.
You want to help people self-serve data for the smooth functioning of the organization. This data democratization process may involve creating automated dashboards, scheduling ETLs, having training sessions, creating query templates, etc.
Provide Business Reviews
Each week, as a Business Intelligence Engineer, you’d create a report based on your analysis for the Weekly Business Review (WBR). You’ll also help create reports for the business reviews that happen monthly, quarterly, and yearly.
Based on your seniority, the report could be on well-defined metrics, or you might need to define new metrics. You’d also develop automation, provide insights about trends and what might be driving them in the weekly report. Your report should help leaders make informed decisions.
Data Engineering
You will likely work on projects that involve shifting data from one database to another. If you know how to create and maintain a pipeline and have relevant experience, that’ll come in handy for this part.
Data Modeling and Applied Statistics
While deriving insights from data, you can use your data science skills to solve business problems. Your acumen in data modeling and applied statistics will help you establish your credibility and help move your career forward.
Minimum Qualifications for the Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer Position
Typically, the minimum qualifications for an Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer will include:
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Econometrics, Engineering, or any closely related field/equivalent experience.
• Experience as an Engineer in the data or Business Intelligence space: 3+ years for BIE, 5+ years for BIE II, 8+ years for Sr. BIE role.
• Experience translating between data and business needs and working directly with business stakeholders.
• Experience with data visualization tools like Tableau, Quicksight, or other similar tools.
• Experience with SQL: expertise in writing and tuning SQL queries.
• Experience with ETL tools: creating and managing data pipelines.
• Experience in relational and dimensional data modeling.
• Strong data presentation skills, verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to effectively communicate with business leaders and technical teams.
Tips to Be an Efficient Business Intelligence Engineer at Amazon
Once you get in and crack your interview, you need to consistently perform and grow within the company. You can use most of these tips before you even apply for the Business Intelligence Engineer position at Amazon. If you gain experience in skills that make you a better fit for the role, you’ll be more likely to get hired! Here are some tips that might help:
- Refine your SQL, statistics, data analytics, and python skills as well.
- Train and become excellent at deriving meaningful insights from data and at identifying trends and potential driving factors for those trends.
- Automate and create solutions, so people can help themselves without needing additional input from you.
- Learn soft skills that help you work seamlessly in your cross-functional BIE role.
- Follow Amazon’s leadership principles and intermittently check if you’re proceeding in line with them.
Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer Interview Questions
Here are some sample Business Intelligence Engineer interview questions from Amazon BIE interviews:
- What are DML, DCL, and DDL?
- How would you simplify a complex pipeline?
- State and explain all types of join in SQL.
- Tell me the difference between union and union all. Which one of the two is faster?
- The probability of a product coming from location A is 0.8, and the probability of the product coming from location B is 0.6. Calculate the probability the customers will receive the product from location A or location B.
Recommended Reading: Amazon SQL Interview Questions
Average Salary of an Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer
A Business Intelligence Engineer in the United States in companies like Amazon typically makes between $77,892 and $102,424, the average salary being $90,341 annually.
The salary may vary significantly based on factors like:
- Location
- Work experience
- Education
- Certifications
FAQs on Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer interview
Q. How hard is it to crack an Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer interview?
The technical questions asked for a Business Intelligence Engineer role at Amazon are usually of medium difficulty. Unless you are applying for a Senior BIE role, you can expect most questions to be of average difficulty along with few easy ones.
Expect to be also evaluated on your past experiences and how well your experiences align with Amazon’s leadership principles. For a prepared candidate, the interview will likely fall in the easy to medium difficulty bracket.
Q. How to land a Business Intelligence Engineer job at Amazon?
Several skills may be needed for you to be interview-ready for a Business Intelligence Engineer role at Amazon. Here are a few things you can do to start:
- Become an expert at writing and tuning SQL queries.
- Know how to create and maintain a pipeline.
- Keep your analytical skills sharp with a focus on statistics and data analytics.
- Know how to use some data visualization and ETL tools.
- Share your previous experiences in the situation, task, action, and result (STAR) format.
- Be ready with stories where you demonstrated how you align with Amazon’s leadership principles.
Read How to Prepare for Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer Interview for more information.
Q. How to crack prepare for a Business Intelligence Engineer interview?
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