Amazon Data Analyst Interview Guide

✅ Top Skills & Tools to Focus On

1. SQL (Most Important)

 🔹 Redshift SQL (PostgreSQL-based): Amazon uses Redshift, so understand large-scale

 🔹 Must master:

o JOINs (INNER, LEFT, etc.)

o GROUP BY, HAVING, WHERE

o Window functions (ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), LEAD/LAG, etc.)

o Subqueries and CTEs

o Performance tuning for large datasets

🧠 Why it's important: Core skill tested at every stage (assessment, virtual loop, Bar Raiser).

2. Statistical Reasoning & A/B Testing

 🔹 Understand:

o P-values, confidence intervals, effect size

o T-tests and multiple comparisons problem (e.g., Bonferroni correction)

o A/B test design, control vs test groups, network effects

 🔹 Example Qs:

o How to assess if a 0.04 p-value is significant

o Debugging biased or skewed test results

🧠 Why it's important: Tests your judgment in drawing conclusions from data, which is vital at
Amazon.

3. Business & Analytical Thinking

 🔹 Ability to:

o Define & analyze KPIs

o Translate insights into actionable business decisions

o Build dashboards and reports (Tableau or Excel)

 🔹 Practice:
 o Business case questions like “Why are Prime renewals dropping?”

o Analyzing customer, supply chain, or product metrics

🧠 Why it's important: Amazon expects customer-focused insights, not just technical correctness.

4. Behavioral & Leadership Principle Alignment

 🔹 Use the STAR method for storytelling.

 🔹 Key Amazon Leadership Principles to highlight:

o Ownership

o Dive Deep

o Deliver Results

o Bias for Action

o Earn Trust

 🔹 Sample behavioral Qs:

o "Tell me about a time you exceeded expectations"

o "How do you explain technical insights to non-technical people?"

🧠 Why it's important: Leadership alignment is a make-or-break factor—especially in the Bar Raiser
round.

5. Communication & Stakeholder Collaboration

 🔹 Practice:

o Explaining SQL logic or test results to non-technical stakeholders

o Connecting data to business impact

o Presenting clearly using visualizations and summaries

 🔹 Tools that help:

o Tableau for dashboards

o PowerPoint/Notion for summaries

🧠 Why it's important: You must influence decisions, not just share data.

6. Tools to Know

Tool Why It Matters

SQL (Redshift) Core querying tool; must master

Excel For quick analysis, trend finding

Tableau For stakeholder communication & dashboards

Python (Pandas/NumPy) Optional but helpful for data cleaning & analysis

Jupyter Notebooks For Python-based data storytelling

📋 Interview Rounds Overview

Stage Focus Areas

Recruiter Call Tech background, tools, stakeholder experience

Online Assessment SQL + data interpretation + logic puzzles

Virtual/On-site Loop SQL round, business case, behavioral (STAR), stakeholder comms

Bar Raiser Round Deep dives into decisions, ambiguity, ownership mindset

🧠 Preparation Strategy

✅ Daily Practice Goals:

 🚀 1–2 SQL challenges (focus on JOINs + window functions)

 📊 1 business case scenario weekly (interpret a dashboard or KPIs)

 🧠 Behavioral story writing (2–3 STAR stories ready)

 📘 Learn A/B testing concepts

 🎯 Mock interviews for communication practice

📝 Amazon-Specific Focus Areas

Category What to Study / Practice

SQL Redshift-style large dataset queries, CTEs, ranking

Statistics Hypothesis testing, p-values, A/B test design

Business Sense KPI creation, metric analysis, decision-making using data

Communication Data storytelling, simplifying insights, dashboards

Leadership Fit STAR stories matching Leadership Principles like “Bias for Action”

💬 Final Tip: Think Like an Amazonian

✅ Highlight:

 Projects where you took initiative

 Automated something

 Caught a data anomaly before it became a problem

 Helped others understand insights

Important Terms

🧩 1. Data Fundamentals

 Data

 Dataset

 Structured data

 Unstructured data

 Semi-structured data

 Big Data

 Data Pipeline

 Data Source

 Data Warehouse

 Data Lake

 Data Mart

 ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)

 ELT (Extract, Load, Transform)

 Data Lifecycle

🧹 2. Data Cleaning & Wrangling

 Missing values

 Outliers

 Data normalization

 Data standardization
  Data transformation

 Null values

 Duplicates

 Data types (int, float, string, datetime, etc.)

 Encoding (Label, One-hot)

 Imputation

 Feature scaling

📊 3. Data Analysis

 Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)

 Descriptive statistics

 Summary statistics

 Correlation

 Covariance

 Grouping

 Aggregation

 Filtering

 Sorting

 Pivot tables

 Cross-tabulation

 Time series analysis

📈 4. Visualization

 Bar chart

 Line graph

 Histogram

 Box plot

 Scatter plot

 Pie chart

 Heatmap

 Treemap
  Area chart

 Dashboard

 Slicers/Filters

 Storytelling with data

💡 5. Business Intelligence (BI) Tools

 Power BI

 Tableau

 Looker

 Excel (Advanced features like PivotTable, VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, etc.)

 KPI (Key Performance Indicator)

 Metric

 Dashboard vs. Report

💻 6. SQL Terms

 Tables

 Columns / Rows

 Primary Key / Foreign Key

 Joins (INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, FULL)

 Subquery

 CTE (Common Table Expression)

 Window functions (ROW_NUMBER, RANK, etc.)

 Aggregate functions (SUM, COUNT, AVG, MIN, MAX)

 GROUP BY / HAVING

 WHERE / ORDER BY

 Indexing

 Normalization (1NF, 2NF, 3NF)

🐍 7. Python for Data Analysis

 Pandas (DataFrame, Series)

 NumPy
  Matplotlib / Seaborn

 Functions

 List comprehension

 Lambda functions

 Map / Filter / Reduce

 Exception handling

 File handling (CSV, Excel, JSON)

 Regex

 JSON handling

🤖 8. Intro to Analytics & Modeling

 Predictive analytics

 Descriptive analytics

 Prescriptive analytics

 Regression

 Classification

 Clustering

 Hypothesis testing (p-value, t-test, chi-square test)

 Confidence interval

 A/B testing

🧠 9. Soft Skills / Business Thinking

 Problem-solving

 Communication (verbal and visual)

 Business acumen

 Domain knowledge (Retail, HR, Finance, etc.)

 Stakeholder management

 Requirement gathering

 Root cause analysis

 Storytelling
🔐 10. Data Governance / Security

 PII (Personally Identifiable Information)

 Data privacy

 GDPR

 Data accuracy

 Data lineage

 Data integrity

⭐ Bonus Terms to Learn (Advanced/Optional)

 API (for data extraction)

 Web scraping

 Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)

 DAX (in Power BI)

 SQL optimization

 Git/GitHub

 Version control

 Data annotation (for ML)

 Data catalog

Techniques performed on Data

📊 A. Data Understanding & Preparation

1. Data Collection

2. Data Profiling
 3. Data Cleaning

4. Handling Missing Values

5. Handling Outliers

6. Data Type Conversion

7. Duplicates Removal

8. Data Normalization / Standardization

9. Data Transformation

10. Feature Engineering

11. Feature Selection

12. Encoding Categorical Variables

13. Data Integration (Merging, Joining)

14. Data Reduction (PCA, etc.)

📈 B. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)

15. Univariate Analysis

16. Bivariate Analysis

17. Multivariate Analysis

18. Descriptive Statistics

19. Grouping and Aggregation

20. Correlation Analysis

21. Trend Analysis

22. Distribution Analysis

23. Time Series Decomposition (Trend, Seasonality)

24. Crosstab Analysis

📉 C. Data Visualization Techniques

25. Bar Chart / Column Chart

26. Pie Chart / Donut Chart

27. Histogram

28. Box Plot

29. Heatmap

30. Scatter Plot

31. Line Chart

33. Pair Plot

34. Treemap

35. Violin Plot

36. Funnel Chart

37. KPI Cards / Scorecards

38. Interactive Dashboards (e.g., Power BI, Tableau)

📚 D. Statistical Techniques

39. Hypothesis Testing

40. Z-test / T-test / Chi-square test / ANOVA

41. Confidence Intervals

42. Sampling Techniques

43. Central Tendency Measures (Mean, Median, Mode)

44. Dispersion Measures (Range, Variance, Std Dev)

45. Probability Distributions (Normal, Poisson, etc.)

🔍 E. Advanced Analytical Techniques

46. Time Series Analysis

47. Clustering (K-Means, Hierarchical)

48. Regression Analysis (Linear, Multiple)

49. Classification Techniques

50. Segmentation Analysis

51. A/B Testing

52. Principal Component Analysis (PCA)

53. Forecasting

54. Text Analysis / NLP

55. Association Rules (Market Basket)

💡 F. Business Analysis & Interpretation

56. KPI Measurement

57. Root Cause Analysis

58. Business Performance Analysis

60. Churn/Retention Analysis

61. Sales Funnel Analysis

62. ROI Analysis

63. Profitability Analysis

64. Cost-Benefit Analysis

Here’s a full list of Data Manipulation Techniques (topics only), useful for data analysts working with tools like
Python (pandas), SQL, Excel, etc.

🔁 1. Data Selection & Filtering

 Column selection

 Row filtering (conditions)

 Boolean indexing

 .loc[] and .iloc[] in pandas

 WHERE clause in SQL

🔄 2. Sorting & Ordering

 Sort by one or multiple columns

 Ascending/descending order

 Custom sort

🔄 3. Renaming & Reshaping

 Renaming columns/rows

 Transposing data

 Pivoting and unpivoting

 Melt and stack/unstack (pandas)

 PIVOT / UNPIVOT in SQL

🔢 4. Aggregation & Grouping

 groupby() in pandas

 GROUP BY in SQL
  Aggregation functions (sum, mean, count, min, max, median, std)

➕ 5. Creating New Columns

 Column calculations

 Conditional columns

 Date/time extraction (year, month, weekday)

 String manipulation (split, strip, replace)

🧹 6. Handling Missing Values

 Detecting nulls

 Dropping nulls

 Filling nulls (mean, median, forward fill, etc.)

 Interpolation

🚫 7. Handling Duplicates

 Identifying duplicates

 Removing duplicates

 Keeping first/last/all

✂️8. Data Slicing & Subsetting

 Head/tail (view top/bottom rows)

 Slicing by index

 Date slicing

 Random sampling

🔀 9. Data Merging & Joining

 Concatenation (rows/columns)

 Merging (left, right, inner, outer joins)

 JOIN operations in SQL

 Merge on index or columns

🧪 10. Data Type Conversion

 Convert string to numeric or datetime

 CAST() / CONVERT() in SQL

📏 11. Scaling & Transformation

 Normalization / Standardization

 Min-Max scaling

 Log transformation

 Binning (equal width/frequency)

 Z-score

📆 12. Date-Time Manipulation

 Converting to datetime

 Extracting parts (day, month, year, etc.)

 Calculating time differences

 Sorting or filtering by date

🧬 13. String Operations

 Case conversion (upper/lower)

 Replace/substitute

 Extract substring

 Regex operations

🔧 14. Advanced Techniques

 Apply functions (apply, map, lambda)

 Window functions (rolling, expanding)

 Cumulative metrics (cumsum, cumprod)

 User-defined functions (UDFs)

Let me know if you want this as a visual PDF or mind map!