Bie

I leaned pretty heavily on this sub and others while prepping, so wanted to give back by sharing my experience interviewing for an L5 BIE (Business Intelligence Engineer) role at Amazon. TL;DR – Recruiter reached out through LinkedIn. I wasn’t thoroughly prepared but gave it my best shot. The online assessment mostly gauges if you know SQL decently well — if you work with it regularly, you’ll be fine. Practice a ton before the technical phone screen — know how to live code without a compiler and seriously, practice, practice, practice. Good luck! ------ A recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn about an L6 BIE role, but after the hiring manager reviewed my resume, I was assigned to an L5 role. There was a generic recruiter phone screen, post which I received the online assessment (OA), which included 2 medium-difficulty SQL coding questions and 10 SQL multiple-choice questions (syntax, functions, clauses, etc.) Once I passed that, I had a 75-minute technical phone screen with a BIE manager. I was told it would be a mix of technical questions and a live SQL coding round. I was also given 2 Leadership Principles in advance to prep behavioral stories for. This was my first interview in 3 years, so I guess I was rusty because I completely bombed the live coding part. They gave me a sample dataset and explained the business case, which was interesting, but when it came to actually writing the code, I went blank. The questions weren’t super hard, I’d rate them medium-hard — and on a normal day, I would've figured it out. But not being able to run/validate my code really threw me off. I spent \~50 minutes trying to get through 2 questions that should’ve taken maybe 15. They skipped the behavioral questions entirely and ended the interview early. (Not surprised — I laugh now, but it was pretty embarrassing.) Some takeaways/tips (for myself and others): * PLEASE get comfortable writing out the entire code without taking breaks in the middle to run/compile. I got into that bad habit when practicing on LC/Stratascratch, so when I had to write code and present it as my final solution without being able to validate results, I was stuck. * Interviewing is an art. I know how to solve these questions and can breeze through them on a regular workday - without any of the external factors. The stress, the composure you need to maintain, talking out loud, needing to backtrack in favor of a more optimal solution - all these things add to the overhead. Interviewing itself takes a lot of practice. * This was my first ever interview after 3 years at my current role. Interviewing for an internal transfer is definitely miles apart from interviewing externally. It will take time, effort, and some (maybe even a lot) of failed tries before something sticks. * Finally, this is a reminder that your performance in an interview is not a reflection of your skills and strengths! Practice makes perfect.