Interview: Amazon Sr. Financial Analyst (Amazon Web Services)
Summary
TLDRДжон, старший финансовый аналитик в Amazon Web Services, делится своим опытом карьеры, начиная с желания работать на Уолл-стрит и проходя через работу в Red Hat и Duke MBA. Он рассказывает о своем пути в Amazon, включая первичный интервью, получение рекомендаций, и важность подготовки к интервью. Также обсуждается его текущая роль, включая управление ежедневными и еженедельными бизнес-обзорами, а также вызовы и удовольствия от работы в корпоративной финансовой роли в Amazon. Джон делится своими мыслями о культуре Amazon, работе с приоритетами и работе-жизни, предоставляя ценные советы для тех, кто стремится присоединиться к Amazon в области финансового менеджмента.
Takeaways
- 😀 Джордж работает в Amazon как старший финансовый аналитик в команде BIA (Business Insights and Analytics) в рамках AWS.
- 🎓 Джордж начал свою карьеру с амбиций работать на Wall Street в сфере исследований акций, но после кризиса 2008-2009 переключился на работу в области финансовых данных и прошел обучение для получения сертификата CFA.
- 🏫 В ходе карьеры Джордж также получил MBA в Duke University, участие в программе для исполнительных менеджеров.
- 🔄 Джордж перешел на работу в Red Hat, где получил ценный опыт в корпоративном финансировании, а затем перешел в Amazon.
- 📈 В Amazon его основные задачи включают управление ежедневным бизнес-обзором (DVR) и еженедельным бизнес-обзором (WBR) для руководства AWS.
- 💼 Джордж подчеркивает важность скорости принятия решений и культуры письменной коммуникации в Amazon, что отличается от его предыдущих опытов работы.
- 🤔 Он считает, что для успешного трудоустройства в Amazon важно понимать, что вы хотите достичь и какую ценность вы принесете в компанию.
- 🔑 Джордж рекомендует аспирантам по финансовым должностям в Amazon использовать методологию 'работы в обратном направлении' для определения своих целей и стратегии.
- 🔄 Он подчеркивает, что работа в Amazon может представлять не только традиционные финансовые задачи, но и новые уровни видимости и возможности для обучения и роста.
- 🏡 Джордж отмечает, что рабоче-личный баланс в Amazon может быть сложным, и важность самоорганизации и коммуникации с руководством о своих приоритетах и границах.
Q & A
Какое название у команды, в которой работает Джо?
-Джо работает в команде BIA (Business Insights and Analytics) в рамках Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Какой была первоначальная карьерная цель Джо после окончания колледжа?
-Джо хотел работать на Wall Street, специализируясь на исследовании акций.
Какое образование получил Джо?
-Джо получил образование по программе MBA в Duke через их выходной исполнительный программу.
Что было ключевым фактором, который помог Джо перейти от работы с финансовым анализом к более практическим задачам?
-Джо хотел быть ближе к бизнесу и понимать, как работает компания изнутри, а не просто с внешнего вида.
Какой была основная причина, по которой Джо отказался от предложения работы в Amazon в первый раз?
-Джо получил предложение на должность финансового аналитика вместо старшего финансового аналитика, на которую он собеседовался, и решил принять предложение о работе в стартапе в качестве менеджера.
Какой была роль рекомендации в процессе собеседования Джо в Amazon?
-Рекомендация от имени Юнга была полезной, также Джо получил поддержку от бывших однокурсников MBA, которые работали в Amazon и проводили собеседования.
Какой была основная задача Джо в Amazon во время собеседования?
-Основная задача Джо заключалась в том, чтобы подготовить примеры своих достижений и ответов на вопросы, которые могут быть заданы во время собеседования.
Какие были основные задачи Джо в своей роли старшего финансового аналитика в Amazon?
-Основные задачи включали управление ежедневным бизнес-обзором (DVR) и еженедельным бизнес-обзором (WBR) для руководства AWS, а также подготовку аналитических отчетов на месячной основе.
Какой культурный аспект работы в Amazon вызвал у Джо больше всего затруднений?
-Культурным аспектом, вызывающим у Джо затруднения, был акцент на скорости принятия решений и написании отчетов, что требует высокого уровня детализации и ясности.
Чем является главным вызовом для Джо в его текущей роли?
-Главным вызовом является необходимость понимать метрики и данные на корпоративном уровне, что требует хороших отношений с другими командами и умения задавать правильные вопросы.
Какой совет Джо дает тем, кто хочет присоединиться к Amazon в области финансового анализа?
-Джо рекомендует понимать, что важно не только то, что вы хотите делать, но и то, что вы можете выучить на данной должности, и использовать это для развития своей карьеры.
Outlines
😀 Интервью с Джоном о его карьере и опыте работы в Amazon
Джон, сеньор-финансовый аналитик в Amazon, делится своим профессиональным путем. Он начал свою карьеру с амбиций работать на Wall Street в сфере исследований акций, но после финансового кризиса перешел в финансовые данные и получил квалификацию CFA. После работы в Red Hat и получения MBA в Duke University, Джон перешел в Amazon, где занимается анализом данных и подготовкой отчетов для руководства. В интервью он также рассказывает о своем первом неудачном интервью в Amazon и о том, как он подготовился вторично, используя рекомендации и поддержку бывших однокурсников.
📊 Обязанности Джона как сеньior-финансового аналитика в Amazon
Джон описывает свою работу в Amazon, включая управление ежедневными и еженедельными бизнес-обзорами для руководства AWS. Он отвечает за подготовку финансовых показателей и выделение ключевых моментов для обсуждения. Джон также участвует в ежемесячных аналитических отчетах, чтобы помочь руководству понять долгосрочные тенденции и основные драйверы роста. Он отмечает, что его роль отличается от традиционной корпоративной финансов, что требует от него быстрого обучения и адаптации к новым метрикам и методам работы.
🚀 Вызовки и настройки в новой роли в Amazon
Джон делится своими впечатлениями о культуре Amazon, которая отличается от того, к чему он привык в Red Hat. Он упоминает о том, что в Amazon большое значение придается скорости принятия решений и культуре письменной коммуникации. Джон также обсуждает трудности, связанные с балансом работы и жизни, и то, как важно для него самоорганизоваться и защищать свои границы, чтобы не быть перегруженным работой.
💼 Советы Джона для аспирантов на финансовую карьеру в Amazon
В заключении Джон дает советы для тех, кто стремится к карьере в финансовом секторе в Amazon. Он рекомендует понимать концепцию 'работы в обратном направлении', начиная с того, что вы хотите достичь и почему. Джон подчеркивает важность адаптации к многообразию ролей и обучения из новых опытов, а также упорного стремления к своим долгосрочным целям, несмотря на временные вызовы.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Amazon
💡Senior Financial Analyst
💡BIA Team
💡AWS
💡CFA
💡MBA
💡Red Hat
💡Work-life balance
💡Corporate finance
💡Equity research
💡Business insights
Highlights
Joe, a Senior Financial Analyst at Amazon, discusses his career transition from equity research to corporate finance.
He shares his experience working on the Business Insights and Analytics team within AWS.
Joe talks about his initial career aspirations in Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis.
He explains his decision to move from an outsider's perspective in equity research to a corporate insider role.
Joe details his educational journey, including obtaining his CFA and MBA from Duke.
He describes his first interview process with Amazon, which resulted in a job offer for a Financial Analyst role.
Joe discusses the importance of having a strong network and doing mock interviews for Amazon's interview process.
He mentions the lack of financial modeling in his interviews, focusing more on behavioral questions.
Joe explains the non-traditional nature of his finance role at Amazon, which does not involve traditional financial modeling.
He outlines his team's responsibilities, including managing daily and weekly business reviews for AWS's CEO.
Joe describes the cultural differences between Amazon and his previous company, Red Hat.
He emphasizes the importance of prioritization and self-advocacy in managing work-life balance at Amazon.
Joe shares his appreciation for Amazon's culture of writing and the training available to improve communication skills.
He provides advice for those interested in joining Amazon's finance department, focusing on understanding the company's 'working backwards' approach.
Joe reflects on the visibility and communication aspects of his role that he enjoys, despite the challenges.
He concludes by discussing the ongoing learning opportunities and the importance of maintaining a clear mental state in a demanding role.
Transcripts
start from backwards why do you want to
do it what is it that you're hoping to
get thank you joe for joining us today i
really really appreciate it would you
please tell me a little bit about
yourself
yeah absolutely thank you for having me
super excited to have this conversation
so my name is joe
i currently work at amazon as a senior
financial analyst on the bia team a
business insights and analytics team
within aws
so for me early in my career i kind of
graduated from college wanting to work
on wall street specifically in equity
research
but that was also at the height of the
financial crisis around 2008 and 2009 so
awful timing but got to work for some
financial data providers and then also
study for my cfa
did that for about four or five years
and then how did i change a heart
the way that i saw it was equity
research is
they're great i love the financial
modeling understanding the business from
numbers perspective but they're more
outsiders
and don't really understand how the
sausage is made from the inside out so
want to get closer to the business and
understand what it's like to you know be
within a company itself
so that's when i transitioned into red
hat where we met and got great
experience on corporate finance
and actually during that time also went
and got my mba at duke through their
weekend executive program
and afterwards i actually interviewed
with amazon
this was about a year and a half ago
went through the entire process got a
job offer
but actually got a job offer for a
financial analyst role instead of a
senior financial analyst which is what i
was interviewing for
fortunately i had another job offer at a
late stage startup as a manager so i
really wanted to get that experience of
being a people manager so ended up
taking that role
throughout covid unfortunately got laid
off
and which was a blessing in disguise
looking back got to spend a lot of time
with the family and then
got another chance to apply to amazon
and here i am today
i've been in this role for about seven
months now eight months
awesome awesome um
so can you tell me a little bit about um
your
process of getting into the company
amazon uh you said you interviewed
before and then you interviewed again
and then joined the company uh can you
share a little bit about like did you
have a referral did you have you know
like what did the interview process look
like and all that
yeah so i had a referral his name is
young
[Laughter]
so that was super helpful but what was
also helpful i had classmates um
from the mba program that went on to
work at amazon and then throughout the
time they kind of different people
interviewed so it was really helpful to
get those perspectives you know what was
the interview process like i even had
one person that was willing to do a mock
interview with me which was extremely
helpful it
helped to relieve a lot of the kind of
butterflies in the stomach just knowing
some kind of questions that they could
ask and then getting direct feedback
immediately after that was really
helpful
um i think the first time around when i
prepared
i didn't have enough examples lined up
you know i thought having six to eight
would be enough didn't realize during
the loop that i would burn through them
much very very fast and so i found
myself kind of limited in the
answers that i had prepared and i think
that ultimately
blocked me from you know getting the job
offer for the sfa role as opposed to
that fa rule
so that that definitely was a learning
experience and helped me tremendously in
the second time around
i'm curious about the financial like
like finance roles interviews because i
i was told that there's some sort of
assessment or like a case or something
that's like you got to do modeling or
something or is that true or was it just
like whole behavior questions throughout
the time
yeah so for me
the first time around there was no
financial modeling
assignment or in both interviews i
didn't have any financial modeling
exercise but in the first interview
there was a case question it was mainly
around you know
launching a new prod product how do you
go about them pricing it you know what
are the different avenues that you need
to look at so a pretty standard case
question that i wasn't fully prepared
for unfortunately and so i think i could
have done much better looking back at it
the second time around there was no case
questions no financial modeling
questions but i will caveat that with my
current role is a bit
non-traditional um from a finance
standpoint where we're not really
forecasting the business we're not
building robust financial models in the
traditional sense so that could be a
part of it
okay interesting interesting
so it was most outside of those
or outside of that specific case
question it was more so around
traditional behavior questions what
amazon uses okay
yeah interesting
um yeah so
can you tell me a little bit about what
you do as a senior financial analyst at
amazon sure
so as i mentioned i work in the aws
business
our team i'd say there's three primary
objectives for the team
one is to manage the daily business
review we call it the dvr for adam
szlovsky the ceo of aws so this is a
report just on a daily basis overall aws
revenue
and then broken out by different
services regions so that
adam and his leadership team have daily
visibility as to how much revenue is
coming in what the year-over-year growth
rate is and what the daily changes are
the other piece is managing the wbr the
weekly business review for the same
audience
and so we put together you know part of
the team puts the entire deck together
and then for me specifically i put the
financial metrics and prepare call-outs
to identify what's happening week over
week and what are some of the things
that are worth calling out and then the
last piece is doing similar work on a
monthly basis so
very similar nature but changing the
time really changes the perspective and
helps prepare the leadership on what the
overall trends are and how to connect
the dot across the business
so those are the three things that we
work on for me
a lot of my time has been focused on the
call-outs themselves during wbr trying
to understand the different metrics the
nuances being able to understand what's
relevant and not relevant to leaders
and then translating that into the
monthly analytic stock which i'm
currently working through it's what what
are the primary drivers month over month
what are potential risks what are some
of the longer trends as we look at you
know over the course of four or five six
months
so you said this role that you're in is
not a traditional finance like corporate
finance role
um was so like coming from
you know a traditional corporate finance
uh working in red hat and then the cloud
bees company that you work for uh was it
did you have a lot of learning curve
coming in and then if yes like what were
some of the resources that you
took to uh took a look into
yeah
so i'd say i'm still going through it
being less than a year old at this
company but i think i'd break it down
probably into two different pieces i
think there's a big cultural component
at amazon that i that was a big learning
curve for me i think more so coming from
a company like red hat which was more
open source so at red hat open source
company it was all about consensus
building so coming out of a meeting
first you had a lot of participants in a
meeting then coming out of a meeting
there weren't clear action items even
when you come to a decision there are
still discussions afterwards try to keep
everybody together and aligned on the
mission that we're going through what
i've noticed here is speed matters and
it matters a lot you go into a half hour
meeting you typically have decisions
being made action items assigned and
then timelines following that to move
things forward and things
seem to move really fast so that was one
cultural thing that i've noticed
the other thing is around priority
it's really on you as an individual to
prioritize and raise your hand to say i
have xyz going on these are the
priorities on my list i can't take on
other things
obviously you can you you keep it in the
backlog but you have to be very clear to
all the people that you work with in
terms of what your priorities are to
ensure that you aren't overwhelmed and
you can kind of meet your commitment
so i'd say those are the big kind of
learning curves for me culturally but to
the specific job itself just there's so
many different metrics and we sit at a
corporate level so just trying to
understand the nuances of the different
metrics and then getting access to a lot
of the data because we are so dependent
on other teams like the services team
not just for the data but for the
insight i think that's been a bit of a
challenge just building that
relationship and understanding how to
ask the right questions
uh yeah so what do you like the most and
maybe what do you like the least about
uh your role
yeah
so i'll start with what i like i think
what i like is the kind of visibility
being able to see
how much you know
visibility in terms of the overall
organization so how much is aws making
you know where is that contribution
coming from by different services
regions
and industries so being able to have a
big overall picture of what's happening
with the company is really cool
and then you know i alluded to this
earlier just being able to participate
in the wbr was the seniors leader there
senior leaders there and just trying to
understand how they think about the
business what are some of the
pain points and challenges that they
have and in those meetings they
typically have three different services
come and do business presentations so
that's a really great opportunity to
learn about different businesses across
aws
i'd say the biggest challenge with this
rule would be more on the tactical side
because we stayed at a corporate level
it's hard to really understand the
details so for example if there's a
specific service that's performing
really well
you know it's hard for us we can
identify that service but it's hard to
understand why and what's driving that
so we have to rely on the service team
to kind of dig into it oftentimes the
priorities aren't aligned because they
have their own priorities that they're
working on so just trying to get that
support in a timely manner
could be challenged just because we
because of the audience are
we can't necessarily plan for things all
the time so things might come up
randomly and that could not really work
out for the you know our partners that
are
needed more and more lead way
yeah no that makes sense yeah so you
mentioned something about you know
um amazon's culture being a little bit
different from what you have been
experiencing in the past
um like can you maybe tell me a little
bit about the company's culture um and a
little bit maybe about like work-life
balance yeah yeah
so
i i still think i'm learning you know
one of the things that i heard
just kind of talking to a lot of
different folks at the company is
give yourself a year at the very least
it takes about a year to understand the
culture and then after that you know
once you move to a different role at
least you'll understand the culture and
then you can kind of focus on the
functional nature of the role and try to
understand it so i think i'm still going
through that growing pain
but one couple things aside from what i
mentioned earlier
that stands out to me is the culture of
writing
that's been
a good unique challenge for me it's a
big
point that i not a strong suit for me
personally so it's been a good learning
experience in terms of how do you write
to certain audiences what's the level of
detail that you need to include not
include how do you structure a simple
email and how do you structure it so
that you have the what happened why it
happened what's being done about it
so all those things have been really
helpful
there's a lot of training available for
writing as well so i've attended a few
and they've been incredibly helpful as
well
so i think that's been a really
interesting cultural learning for me
work-life balance has been tough that's
largely
the reason why it's been tough is what i
realize it's a lot on you to kind of
push and protect your own boundary so
again i talked about priority
prioritization
i think that is for me the biggest
defense mechanism if you will for myself
is to have a constant list of x y and z
that i'm working on
be clear and over communicate my with my
manager on what those priorities are
and be very honest to say these are the
priorities if i need to swap things out
i can swap it out but it has to be
swapped out anything added to it is
going to be more work which i'm open to
doing but you just got to be clear about
when you're working over hours and
whether that's necessary or not because
my manager and i've had clear
conversations around we shouldn't work
late you know weekends need to be
protected
um things of that nature and i think the
intention is there it's just a matter of
the responsibility as on the individual
to say i have too much on my plate
either i need support or i need a deep
prioritized bt prioritize certain things
and that's been a
tough and ongoing challenge and a
learning for me personally
yeah i know that makes total sense i
think you know just being able to
prioritize stuff
and being able to kind of talk to
your manager about that i think is a
good thing um that you can do
okay my last question is advice for
those who want to join amazon
in the finance world
yeah
um
you know one of the
one of the concepts at amazon that i
really like and enjoy is the idea of
working backwards
and i feel like that's just a general
good practice um to kind of get used to
so i'd say that same thing about you
know wanting to join amazon and wanting
to work in a finance professional as a
financial professional just trying to
understand start from backwards why do
you want to do it what is it that you're
hoping to get
and part of that is if amazon's such a
big company um even within finance
there's so many different varying roles
and that's kind of where i found myself
or this is a non-traditional financial
what i've had to do is
not get upset that this isn't the kind
of financial model building forecasting
kind of role that i would enjoy but to
think about what are some of the
positive things that i can take away
from this and what i've realized for
myself is
the visibility the ability to
communicate the ability to kind of
ask the right questions to get certain
answers that i need
and so keeping that in mind with the you
know being anchored with where i want to
be in the future i think has helped me
tremendously especially when times get
tough and feel overburdened overwhelmed
with the work i think that's helped me
keep
just be in a better mental state
yeah no i
that's that's definitely yeah you got
you got a
it's not about what you want to do all
the time it's just like what you also
learn that's that's the important piece
as well yeah plenty of opportunities to
learn at this place awesome yes yes
plenty of plenty of things to learn
yeah um joe that was it for today thank
you so much for your time really
appreciate it absolutely it was a lot of
fun thank you for having me thank you
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