Amazon BIE/DE Description Requirements

Link to Amazon BIE/DE Practice Questions

What does a BIE do at Amazon?

• Our business intelligence engineers (BIEs) build out a variety of analytics. As a BIE, you’ll define key performance indicators (KPIs), automate data pipelines, and create reports, dashboards, and visualizations.
• Our BIEs understand statistics, data warehousing, and Extract, Transform, and Load, (ETL), and they are proficient in SQL.
• Our BIEs are able to work with ambiguous data, using advanced SQL and scripting to come up with answers that may not be immediately obvious.
• Our BIEs are able to translate between business needs and data, and are able to create actionable insights for their stakeholders.

Key job responsibilities

As a Business Intelligence Engineer intern, you will/may:

• Build small to mid-size business intelligence (BI) solutions – data sets, queries, reports, dashboards, analyses – or components of larger solutions to answer business questions with data
• Use well-defined requirements to build a solution that enables effective, data-driven business decisions. Deliver end product on schedule
• Create and populate data structures using one or more schema definition languages (e.g. DDL, SDL, XSD, RDF)
• Write secure, stable, testable, and maintainable code with minimal defects, and automate manual processes where possible
• Use one or more industry analytics visualization tools (e.g. Excel, Tableau, QuickSight, MicroStrategy, PowerBI) and, as needed, statistical methods (e.g. t-test, Chi-squared) to deliver actionable insights to stakeholders
• Invent, refine, and develop BI solutions to ensure they meet the needs of the business and team goals
• Troubleshoot data, analyses, and code, research root causes, propose solutions, and take ownership in next steps for their resolutions

A day in the life

• Do you enjoy translating data into actionable insights?
• Are you excited by the opportunity to troubleshoot features and products at the world’s most customer-centric company?
• Are you passionate about mining data, developing models, using statistical and visualization techniques, and helping leaders make data-driven decisions?
• Do you want to be a part of a fast-paced, ambiguous environment and contribute to one of the most visited sites on the Internet?

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience with data querying or modeling with SQL
• Experience building and maintaining basic data artifacts (e.g., ETL, data models, queries)
• Experience with one or more industry analytics visualization tools (e.g. Excel, Tableau, QuickSight, MicroStrategy, PowerBI) and statistical methods (e.g. t-test, Chi-squared)
• Are 18 years of age or older
• Work 40 hours/week minimum and commit to 12 week internship maximum
• Currently working towards a Bachelor’s Degree in statistics, computer science, computer engineering, information management/systems, business analytics or other equivalent technical discipline with a conferral date between October 2025 – December 2028.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience with scripting language (e.g., Python, Java, or R)
• Knowledge of data modeling and data pipeline design
• Experience applying basic statistical methods (e.g. regression) to difficult business problems
• Knowledge of how to improve code quality and optimizes BI processes (e.g. speed, cost, reliability)
• Experience with relational and star schema data modeling concepts.
• Previous technical internship(s), if applicable.
• Ability to deal with ambiguity in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent verbal/written communication skills and data presentation skills.
• Strong analytical skills.
• Enrolled in a Master’s Degree or advanced technical degree with a conferral date between October 2025 – December 2028.

Technical phone screening

Depending on the role, there will be one to two technical phone screenings. A technical phone screening lasts 60 minutes and is with a senior leader on our team. The interviewer will ask you behavioral/situational and technical questions.

SQL

• You need to demonstrate a solid foundation in SQL. Always seek clarification and verify assumptions about the questions, even if you think they’re clear.
• Be prepared to write SQL queries and think about edge cases. You’ll need to understand different types of joins and how condition filters affect the joins.
• Be familiar with ways of simplifying a complex query and optimizing performance.

Sample questions:

• Give me a query that shows how many units I received per week, for the past year.
• Give me a query that shows how long it takes these units to arrive.
• Give me a list of item IDs that we received in the past two months, from more than one vendor, where the cost was different.

Technical

• Practice ETL processes and data warehousing concepts.
• Hone your skills in data visualization tools.
• Brush up on statistics and coding skills.
• Learn diverse database management systems.
• Familiarize yourself with cloud platforms.
• Understand data security and compliance.

Leadership Principles

• Familiarize yourself with Amazon’s Leadership Principles for behavioral questions. There’s no need to memorize them.
• Prepare a few specific examples related to recent projects, team interactions, and product deliveries (avoid confidential information).
• Emphasize the importance of data and analytics in supporting your decisions, as Amazon is data-driven.
• Highlight how your decisions or projects impacted customers and stakeholders, demonstrating customer obsession.

Interview loop

• Your loop will include five 55-minute interviews where you’ll meet with members of our business intelligence community.
• You’ll have the chance to discuss your experiences and expertise in several areas that help us determine success at Amazon.
• These areas include both technical competencies and non-technical competencies that are based off of our Leadership Principles, which different interviewers will be assigned to evaluate.

SQL and Basic scripting

• Be prepared to write SQL queries and think about edge cases. You’ll need to understand different types of joins and how condition filters affect the joins.
• There may also be more conceptual conversations around troubleshooting/tuning, composite keys, and temp tables.
• Familiarize yourself with some ETL strategies, SQL optimization techniques, and data modeling for dashboard performance.
• Write a list of requirements in your notes and keep asking questions, as the initial problem statement may be vague. Requirements should be the first thing you write.
• Interact with your interviewer. Ask necessary questions to complete the exercise.
• Know how your solution solves the problem. If you suggest technology to help solve, understand how that technology works.
• Think out loud as you work through the problem. This allows the interviewer to better follow and understand your thought process.
• Review your code and clean up any mistakes. Point out ways in which you can optimize the query for performance.
• Demonstrate your understanding of fundamental data warehousing concepts, such as star/snowflake, dimensions, facts, aggregates, fact-less, and hierarchies.

Analytical problem solving

• Demonstrate your comfort with statistics concept and scripting.
• We want to ensure you understand basic statistics and can apply statistical methods to business problems.
• We may walk you through an analytical problem.
• You may be asked a basic coding/scripting question. We’re open to any software languages, but be prepared to talk through any technologies listed on your resume.

Visualization, metrics and reporting

• Be prepared to build out analytics and visualizations for stakeholders, such as dashboards (Quicksight, Tableau, etc.), reports (Excel, etc.), and define KPIs that will result in measurable success.
• We don’t have a preference for specific visualization tools; we’re more interested in your process and approach.
• Speak through your thought process—this is very important!

Expectations:

• Demonstrate your ability to build highly leveraged reports ensuring optimal performance.
• Demonstrate your ability to perform deep dives on data on emerging business questions.
• Demonstrate your ability to identify and define proper metrics with the given datasets.

Business acumen/requirements gathering

BIEs need to understand business requirements and how to translate them into meaningful data.

• Demonstrate how you would effectively work with a project manager or work on a specific business problem. We want to ensure you can smoothly work with the business to solve a problem.
• Show how you know what decisions are being made from the BI artifacts that you produce.
• Share examples of when you worked with a business to gather requirements, and when you created analysis and reporting that met customer use cases.
• Show how you problem solve by using data analysis or statistical methods.
• Demonstrate how you translate ambiguous problems into requirements and pull insights from analyzing data sets.

Behavioral interview

• A significant portion of the conversation will focus on how you’ve demonstrated our Leadership Principles in your past jobs. This is because past behavior is an indicator of future success.
• We won’t ask brain teasers. Instead, we’ll focus on the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of your experiences, as well as the ‘why’ of your decisions.
• Each interviewer will typically ask two or three behavioral-based questions about successes or challenges and how you handled them using our Leadership Principles.

Best practices:

• Prepare to go deep into the details about your previous work.
• Use the STAR model to structure your responses, making it clear what actions you took in each situation.
• Focus on what you owned and worked on rather than what your team did. ‘I’ is better than ‘we.’
• Provide examples of how you’ve taken responsibility for any shortfalls or mistakes.
• Demonstrate transparency. Discuss how you’ve openly communicated and addressed issues honestly.
• Show how you’ve honored commitments and followed through on tasks until they were completed.
• Use examples where you sought input and included your team in decision-making.
• Don’t finger-point or blame-shift when discussing challenges. Focus on how you found a solution.
• Demonstrate how you built positive relationships with your team and made an effort to produce high-quality work.
• Provide examples when you sought feedback and learned from your mistakes.
• Show how you took ownership of business problems and worked to find solutions that improved performance.
• Include examples of when you learned new skills or technologies that were outside of your comfort zone.
• Discuss ways you improved processes and collaborated with other teams to achieve better results.
• Give examples of how you’ve followed through on projects and gathered metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your solutions.