Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer Interview Experience — SQL Interrupted and a Shortened Phone Screen

Amazon·Business Intelligence Engineer·Sep 2026
Technical Screenhard

I'd interviewed for Amazon BIE twice before. This was my third time, and the content was different every time.
There aren't many related questions shared, so I'm contributing my experience to give everyone a sense of the difficulty.

SQL:
Write a query to find departments where more than 50% of employees exceeded their quarterly targets, but the department's overall sales growth is below the company average. Include a year-over-year comparison.
Tables: employees, department, sales, targets.
Follow-up question: What if some employees belong to multiple departments?

Data visualization:
A single-page dashboard for an Operations VP to analyze warehouse inbound operations and help them decide how to improve supply-chain efficiency.
Define metrics and charts.

The interviewer was a senior data engineer with over ten years at an IT consulting company. While I was writing SQL, the interviewer kept interrupting me to say my logic was wrong. I got more and more nervous and got stuck partway through. I was told I had 20 minutes for the question, but around the 15-minute mark the interviewer decided I was writing too slowly, interrupted me, and wouldn't let me continue. I later reviewed what I'd written with GPT, and the logic wasn't wrong. Anyway, I probably failed.

Also, HR originally said it would be leadership principles + SQL + data visualization, but the preparation email also mentioned Python. In the end it was only SQL and visualization, plus a little self-introduction and time to ask the interviewer questions. They said the interview would be 75 minutes, but the interviewer ended it after one hour.

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Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Amazon
Role
Business Intelligence Engineer
Rounds
Technical Screen
Difficulty
hard
Interview date
Sep 2026
Questions from this interview
1 question

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