Interview: Amazon Sr. Financial Analyst (Amazon Web Services)
Summary
TLDRJoe, a senior financial analyst at Amazon's AWS Business Insights and Analytics team, shares his career journey from equity research to corporate finance at Red Hat and his MBA at Duke. He discusses his Amazon interview process, the importance of preparation and referrals, and his current role's focus on managing business reviews and financial metrics. Joe highlights the cultural shift to Amazon's fast-paced environment, the challenge of work-life balance, and offers advice for aspiring Amazon finance professionals, emphasizing the importance of understanding one's goals and the value of learning from diverse roles.
Takeaways
- 😀 Joe is currently a Senior Financial Analyst at Amazon, working on the BIA team within AWS.
- 🎓 Early in his career, Joe aspired to work in equity research on Wall Street but pivoted to financial data providers and pursued his CFA.
- 🏫 He transitioned from equity research to corporate finance at Red Hat, where he also earned his MBA through Duke's weekend executive program.
- 🤝 Joe's first interview with Amazon resulted in a job offer for a Financial Analyst role, not the Senior Financial Analyst role he interviewed for.
- 📈 He initially took a role at a late-stage startup for management experience but was laid off during COVID, which led to his current opportunity at Amazon.
- 🔄 Joe's role at Amazon involves managing daily and weekly business reviews, focusing on revenue and growth metrics for AWS.
- 💼 The cultural shift from Red Hat to Amazon was significant, with Amazon valuing speed and directness more than consensus-building.
- 📝 Amazon's emphasis on writing skills was a new challenge for Joe, requiring clarity and structure in communication.
- 🚀 Joe enjoys the visibility his role provides into AWS's financial performance and the opportunity to interact with senior leaders.
- 🤔 The biggest challenge for Joe is the tactical distance from the details of specific services, requiring reliance on other teams for insights.
- ⏰ Work-life balance at Amazon is a personal responsibility, requiring clear communication with managers about workload and priorities.
Q & A
What is Joe's current position at Amazon?
-Joe is currently working at Amazon as a Senior Financial Analyst on the BIA (Business Insights and Analytics) team within AWS.
Why did Joe change his career from equity research to corporate finance?
-Joe wanted to get closer to the business and understand what it's like to be within a company itself, rather than being an outsider in equity research.
How did Joe prepare for his interviews at Amazon?
-Joe prepared for his interviews at Amazon by getting referrals, seeking perspectives from classmates who worked at Amazon, and even doing a mock interview which helped him with direct feedback.
What was Joe's experience with the interview process for Amazon's finance roles?
-Joe's interview process involved behavioral questions and a case question during his first interview, but no financial modeling exercises. His second interview also did not include case or financial modeling questions.
What are the three primary objectives of Joe's team at Amazon?
-The three primary objectives of Joe's team are to manage the daily business review (DVR), the weekly business review (WBR), and similar work on a monthly basis.
How does Joe's role at Amazon differ from traditional finance roles?
-Joe's role is non-traditional as it does not involve forecasting or building robust financial models in the traditional sense. It focuses more on managing business reviews and analyzing metrics.
What cultural aspects of Amazon did Joe find challenging?
-Joe found the speed of decision-making and the culture of writing at Amazon to be challenging, especially the need to prioritize and communicate clearly about his workload and boundaries.
What advice does Joe have for those wanting to join Amazon in the finance field?
-Joe advises potential candidates to understand their motivations for joining Amazon, to be prepared to work backwards from their goals, and to focus on the visibility and communication skills they can gain from the role.
How does Joe handle work-life balance at Amazon?
-Joe handles work-life balance by prioritizing his tasks, communicating his workload with his manager, and being clear about his boundaries to ensure that he is not overwhelmed.
What is Joe's perspective on the visibility and communication aspects of his role?
-Joe appreciates the visibility his role provides into the overall organization and the opportunity to participate in senior leadership meetings, which allows him to understand how they think about the business.
Outlines
😀 Introduction and Career Transition
Joe, a senior financial analyst at Amazon, discusses his career journey, starting with aspirations to work in equity research on Wall Street. However, due to the financial crisis, he began working with financial data providers and pursued his CFA. After gaining experience, Joe decided to transition into corporate finance at Red Hat, where he also earned his MBA through Duke's weekend executive program. He then interviewed with Amazon but initially took a managerial role at a startup. After being laid off during COVID, he re-applied to Amazon and has been in his current role for about seven to eight months.
📈 Insights on Amazon's Interview Process and Role
Joe shares his experience with Amazon's interview process, highlighting the importance of referrals and insights from former classmates who worked at Amazon. He emphasizes the value of mock interviews and the need to prepare a variety of examples. He also discusses the differences between his first and second interviews, noting the absence of financial modeling exercises in his second interview. Joe's current role in the AWS BIA team focuses on managing daily and weekly business reviews, providing financial metrics and insights to leadership. He explains that his role is non-traditional, as it does not involve extensive financial modeling or forecasting.
🌟 Navigating Amazon's Corporate Culture and Work-Life Balance
Joe talks about the cultural shift he experienced moving from Red Hat to Amazon, noting the importance of speed and prioritization in decision-making at Amazon. He discusses the learning curve associated with Amazon's culture of writing and the emphasis on clear communication. Joe also addresses the challenge of maintaining work-life balance, stressing the need for individuals to set boundaries and prioritize tasks effectively. He appreciates the visibility his role provides into AWS's financial performance and the opportunity to participate in high-level business reviews.
💼 Advice for Aspiring Amazon Finance Professionals
In the final paragraph, Joe offers advice for those interested in joining Amazon's finance team. He encourages prospective candidates to understand Amazon's 'working backwards' approach and to consider the broader learning opportunities beyond traditional financial roles. Joe suggests focusing on the visibility and communication skills one can develop, even if the role isn't heavily focused on financial modeling. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining a clear vision of one's future goals and using those to guide current work and learning.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Senior Financial Analyst
💡AWS
💡MBA
💡Referral
💡Financial Modeling
💡Behavioral Interview
💡WBR (Weekly Business Review)
💡Corporate Culture
💡Prioritization
💡Work-Life Balance
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 BIA team within AWS, focusing on business insights and analytics.
Joe's initial aspiration was to work in equity research on Wall Street, influenced by the financial crisis.
He details his journey from financial data provider roles to earning his CFA.
The decision to move from equity research to corporate finance to gain insider business understanding.
Joe's experience at Red Hat in corporate finance and obtaining his MBA at Duke.
His first interview with Amazon, the learning curve, and not getting the desired role.
The importance of having a strong network and doing mock interviews for Amazon's interview process.
Joe explains the difference between financial roles at Amazon and traditional finance positions.
He describes his role's focus on managing daily and weekly business reviews for AWS leadership.
The cultural shift Joe experienced moving from Red Hat's consensus-driven culture to Amazon's speed-focused approach.
Amazon's emphasis on writing and the training resources available to improve communication skills.
Challenges in work-life balance at Amazon and the importance of self-advocacy for setting boundaries.
Joe's advice for those interested in finance roles at Amazon, emphasizing the importance of understanding one's goals and the company's culture.
The concept of 'working backwards' at Amazon and its impact on Joe's approach to his role.
Joe reflects on the visibility and communication aspects of his role that he finds most rewarding.
He discusses the challenges of understanding detailed service performance from a corporate finance perspective.
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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