It was June 2020. Lisa had just graduated a month ago and was still enjoying her break.
She studied statistics from a California state university and was going to join a startup in SF as a data scientist.
One week before her original start date, she got a call from the startup’s HR, who told her, unfortunately, due to Covid, their budget was cut, and her role got canceled.
It was a rather frustrating experience, to say at least, let alone it was meant to be Lisa’s first job, and she had never experienced anything like that in her life.
Feeling embarrassed, Lisa kept her head down for about a month. Then, towards the end of August, she decided to get herself up and give the job search another try.
In the next six months, she applied for hundreds of jobs, talked to many companies, got into several final rounds of interviews, but still no offer.
She didn’t stop. Instead of just sitting there, she went to the internet, tried her best to learn what’s needed to land a job, and reached out to us at instamentor through a friend.
And today, it’s our great pleasure to announce that, after a couple of months of preparations, mock interviewing, and relentless practicing, Lisa has just landed a great job offer at Amazon.
And she is going to start in 2 weeks as an entry-level Business Intelligence Engineer.
This time, she decides no more long break before her job starts.
We think that is a very smart decision 😃.
TLDR
Candidate: Lisa
Joined instamentor.com: Feb 2021
YoE: 0 (fresh graduate)
Degree: B.S. in Economics
Offer: Yes
TC: ~120k USD
Location: Seattle, WA
Timeline
Feb 2021: submitted application at amazon.com
March 2021: started coaching on instamentor.com
April 2021: talked to HR and scheduled the first two rounds of technical interviews.
May 2021: final round of interview
June 2021: verbal offer, negotiation, and final signed offer.
Here is a list of sample questions we practiced during our mock interviews, and according to Lisa, it has been super helpful for her preparations.
Similar questions had been asked during her actual amazon interviews.
Statistics:
- How to explain the p-value to non-technical people?
- What are the assumptions for a two-sample t-test?
Leadership/Behavioral questions:
- Tell me about yourself;
- Most innovative project;
- Biggest failure;
- Most proud project, how did you collect its requirements, given a chance to do again, what would you have done differently.
- One example of customer obsession;
- One example of dealing with conflict;
- One example of bias towards action;
Data/Technical:
- SQL window functions: row_number, lead/lag;
- Difference between subquery and join;
- Experience with data visualization, tableau;
- How to determine if a product should amazon offer as a subscription service? Write a SQL query to find those products.
