This guide is for experienced professionals who are looking to build their career into Cloud domain and may be concerned that landing a job at Amazon is beyond reasonable. Someone had told me as well that the job market is uncertain and I should stick to my previous position. This story is about beating the odds, this is how I landed my job at Amazon. YMMV!

**Read about my background and who I am.

TL;DR

• 2.5 years of architecting experience working with various leading organisations, helping them secure/strengthen their devops/devsecops pipelines
• 3X Google Cloud Platform certificates, 2X Kubernetes Certificates
• An up-to date Linkedin profile
• Amazon behavioural interview playlist from Dan Croitor
• Behavioural interview practice sessions from Pramp

Don’t miss the golden nugget from Dan

What this article has:

1. How I landed calls from Google and Amazon
2. My preparation journey
3. Interview process
4. Learning and tips

If you had read through my background, you would know that I had resigned from my previous organisation without any new job offer in hand (I would not recommend it to anyone, though - given we are in-middle of a pandemic situation together). It was March end. Everyone had moved to work from home, the job market was scary, hiring was virtually frozen. Interviews had moved all virtual.

To start with, I refreshed my resume, floated it on local job search portals, on LinkedIn and sent it to my friend circle. If you would like to know which factor mattered for me most while job search - I would undoubtedly attribute it to a good LinkedIn presense, to willingness to reach out to people who matter at various organisations. There are many online resources about how to polish your profile and reach, please refer to those.

So, around 20 days after starting my job search, I eventually landed a job offer from a Bengaluru based niche AWS services oriented startup. The interview process was all hands-on where I was given a problem statement around kubernetes on AWS and I needed to implement it in my AWS account and then give a detailed explanation to the panel. This infused confidence in my AWS skills (however little they were, given my focus areas were Kubernetes and GCP). I had landed my first job offer!! :) But yes, this post is about getting a job at Amazon, let’s get to the point!

How I Landed Calls from Google and Amazon

Yes, you read it correctly. I had a Google recruiter reaching out to me via LinkedIn for Customer Engineer roles with focus on helping their customers in the space of hybrid Infrastructure and Application development. I figured that it had more of a Pre-Sales component but still went ahead and floated my resume, needless to say I did not reach the actual interviews, my profile was rejected after initial screening, due to lack of extensive pre-sales experience, though I had 2 rounds of discussions with recruiting team members. This is when I was introduced to FAANG’s structural interview process.

After a couple of days, an Amazon employee reached out to me via LinkedIn and asked me to send a profile for a Cloud Architect role. I did not have any AWS certifications with me, but anyways I was in the job market (and I had proved my AWS skills and landed a job offer too) - so I promptly responded with an updated profile. This was around mid May’2020. My notice period was getting over by the end of May.

Preparation Journey

I did not specifically prepare for the technical round of the AWS interview, I would attribute it to the fact that I was technically prepared by attending multiple interviews which I got through local job portals and via LinkedIn. First round at AWS was a technical screening round and an AWS Cloud Architect joined as panel, he introduced himself and gave a brief overview about the job role and the department and what work they do there. Then the actual interview started.

Questions ranged from making a decision about using hosted or self managed kubernetes clusters for organisations of various sizes. Interviewer wanted to understand trade-offs, considerations and the rationale behind my architectural choices and recommendations. Quickly it moved into kubernetes security and devops areas which were the highlight of my career, the kind of projects I did in the past, how did I solve specific complex problems for my customers. Questions were poised such that they start small and then delve into details as we move forward. Still I would say that most of the questions were from the areas I had mentioned in my resume. No questions were asked around programming languages/algorithms etc. I had enjoyed the interview and the process. It was technically stimulating for me.

I had good vibes about how the interview went so I went online searching how the rest of the interview process looks like. This is when I came across treasure trove of wonderful playlists from Dan Croitor He does a great job dissecting each and every step of the Amazon Interview Process, officially known as The Loop. Amazon heavily emphasizes on finding candidates who exhibit 14 leadership principles. Later on I got to hear from an Amazon recruiter that I had cleared the technical round and I would get initiated into the Loop. Hurray!!

The loop process is outlined at amazon.jobs portal which also has helpful resources about using STAR format, about Leadership Principles. Usually the loop happens at the Amazon office where prospective candidates spend a full day meeting and interviewing with various Amazonians. But due to Covid-19 situation everything has moved into the virtual arena.

As part of the loop process, I was tasked with an AWS based case study to provide a solution for a hypothetical company with certain business and technical requirements. I was asked to submit a 6 pager architecture presentation based on which my first loop round would take place. I worked on this for 2 days and sent it to my recruiter. Basically I used my GCP know-how to prepare the architecture and mapped GCP services to AWS ones in the solution. Also made use of the ever helpful AWS Architecture site.

Couple of days later, I received the loop schedule, it was 4 rounds back to back each 1 hour, with a break of 1 hour for lunch. I brushed up my AWS concepts by playing Stephane Maarek’s course at 1.5x speed. Also, I went back to Dan’s awesome playlist about interviewing at Amazon. I literally spent around 3 days preparing notes and answers around each leadership principle. I dial-ed in my friends and co-workers to find out the scenarios and the behaviours which I exhibited as part of my work and moulded them to map as per these principles.

I signed up with Pramp for preparing behavioural interviews by role play. It is a platform that allows you to practice video interviews with peers at no cost. Basically you sign up and agree to take an interview for your peers (anyone from around the globe may join) and then midway of the interview role are reversed and then your peer interviews you. Behavioural question sets are provided over the email before the start of the interview. It is a great platform which allowed me to polish the interview skills by role-play and to get instant feedback from peers. I would suggest to utilise them if you are undergoing any sort of behavioural interviews. I did 2 sessions with them as part of preparations.

Not to forget Dan also provides no cost behavioural role play interviews on his website apart from his paid services, I did not use it though.

Interview process

In total I faced 1 case study + 4 behavioural rounds, spreaded across 2 days, as part of the loop. On the first day of the loop, I was scheduled for 4 rounds of interviews each 1 hour long, first one being the discussion around AWS case study. Most of the questions in this round were around the architectural choices I had made while preparing the solution. Interviewer wanted to figure if the proposed solution meets the business and technical requirements as outlined under case study. Several questions were around capabilities of specific AWS services that I had used, some were around enhancing the approach by introducing newer constraints. I could answer several of these but were not able to answer a few which I did not have enough knowledge about. I appraised the panel that I have more experience with GCP and with Kubernetes. Interviewer asked questions regarding my previous projects as well, going deeper into my cloud architecting experience, the scale of problems that I had solved earlier.

Upcoming round was the start of behavioural ones, but the panel did not join. I was informed about this earlier by my recruiter so had left with 2 more for this day. First behavioural interview was an easy one where I was asked both positive and negative questions. Positive ones were about success stories where I could show off about my achievements in my previous jobs and failure ones were to gauge my behaviour in adverse conditions and to find how I act to cope with it and came out stronger.

Next round was what I believe was the toughest of all, the panel was a senior member at AWS. He explained that I should be using STAR format to answer, and asked me to be specific. Mostly I believe this round was a Bar Raiser round, tough questions were asked and the interviewer was deeply interested to go deeper in the situations I came up with as answers. Also, few of my answers were discarded saying ‘this does not look that difficult a problem, can you come up with another scenario or problem’. At times, I took longer pauses searching for answers than I would have liked to. Dan in his videos says to prepare around 20 scenarios for loop interviews so that same scenarios are not repeated across different interviews. I did not have enough of these and this ‘Bar raiser’ interview made me realise the gap in my preparation. Anyways, I answered the questions at the best of my abilities and hoped for the best!

I informed her that I had 3 interviews done in the day to my recruiter and asked her for further steps. Eventually after a couple of follow ups - my next rounds were scheduled 4 days later. And I went back to my study board and dug further on my scenarios preparations. In this meantime I connected with one of my friends who is an Amazonian herself and got valuable interview tips on how to map interview questions which were asked to me in my previous interviews to amazon’s leadership principles. This way I could narrow the focus to those leadership principles which were not yet covered. I utilised the technique which Dan talks about - zoom in and zoom out of the situations to come up with several new scenarios which motivated me to push myself in next rounds.

Final day had 2 rounds of interviews scheduled. This time I was pumped up and was ready to give my best shot, understanding this is a do or die(not literally). Questions in day’s first round were around Customer Obsession which is one of the 14 leadership principles. Interviewer wanted to understand how I earn and kept the trust of the customers at my previous job. This was a relatively easy round I would say. Then came the day’s last interview, the panel was Cloud Technical Account Manager at AWS, quite an experienced person. His questions were regarding thinking big and insist on higher standards, again part of Amazon’s leadership principles. I finished this round earlier and had nearly 15 minutes left on the slot, so I discussed various amazon related things with him, his journey at amazon, the team he is working in, the likes and dislikes about his work. Panel was open in his responses which I found to be a great thing. He wished me luck for my journey ahead.

Next was the wait time to hear from my recruiter about my results. I got to hear from her that all panel members would gather and discuss their individual feedback about me and a hire or no hire decision would be made with consensus. Upon reflection I thought that I did well in the interview process but my lack of aws certification could be a spoil sport. I however had 3X GCP certs and 2X Kubernetes certs under my belt. I had been architecting cloud solutions with containers and with GCP for around 2.5 years. So I was still confident of the outcome.

Then after a wait of a couple of days, I received a call from my recruiter that I have been selected and would be provided an offer to join Amazon, I was so happy to hear these words. Performed a quick fist pump in the air!! :) I then received a call from the hiring manager as well, as per her my biggest strength is to learn and be curious, again an Amazon leadership principle and she would be more than happy to have me join her team. She informed me that the initial couple of months would be spent ramping up on AWS skills and I would be required to earn a few AWS certificates too as part of the process, to which I wholeheartedly agreed!!

Photo by Stan B on Unsplash

So, yes - I was able to crack the interviews at Amazon and land a job in the global pandemic situation, all without any AWS certificate :P

Learning and Tips

• Amazon interviews happen using the Chime application. I would say the user interface takes some effort to get familiarised so suggestion is to install it well ahead and play around to get used to various controls. Keep it installed on your phone and on your laptop as well, so that in case of trouble with a single device - you could use a standby device, HA anyone?
• Spend tons of time going through Dan’s playlist for Amazon interviews, trust me - it’s a gold mine. You would not regret spending time there! Also prepare multiple scenarios. Not just in your mind, but pen it down to solidify, and practice with peers or in-front of a mirror.
• Sign up for Pramp behaviour interviews for free or use Dan’s free peer interviews. This gives you the benefit of getting peer’s reviews live and you could learn from your peers new tactics when dealing with behavioural interviews. Remember practice makes one perfect.
• Because all interviews happen virtual - ensure to have a well lit room, good stable camera, calm setting and a strong internet connection. Focus eye contact to the laptop’s webcam. Study about how to keep a good body language while giving virtual interviews and use those.

On closing note - all you want is just a single job. Go give your best for it, pandemic or no pandemic. May the force be with you. GodSpeed and best wishes. :)

This post has been a really long one, thank you for reading all the way. In case you have got questions or want to give a shout out - reach me via LinkedIn, I would be happy to help.