Thinking about the AWS Solutions Architect role? Then read this
In my short (or long) time at AWS I have been in the PSA and SA role and in the Colombia and London office. The SA role has allowed me to learn about so many different technologies and also discover new talents that I was not aware of that I had. I had the opportunity to visit many Latam countries and to work with customers of different sizes, industries and types. AWS, without a doubt, has been one of the best experiences in my life.
Recently, I was part of a webinar panel looking to attract diverse candidates for the SA role. After it ended, I discovered my LinkedIn full of new invitations and messages about sharing my experience and tips to start a journey on AWS. As a result, I decided to write a blog post trying to do my best in sharing my experience as an AWS SA.
I will speak specifically about the SA role and my experience and tips that helped me. This is my point of view and shouldn’t be considered as the ultimate truth.
The SA role is like being in a rollercoaster, you will join AWS and within the first month you will realise i) that you just push yourself SO far from your comfort zone, ii) that there are so many things you do not know and iii) that you are surrounded by so many clever, intelligent, smart and charming people. And most probably, you will experience the impostor syndrome — good news: everyone experience it and it’s part of the process of becoming an SA in a company with the most cool and innovative technology — bad news: the feeling probably won’t go away. On the other end, every day you will look back at your old self and realise how much you have learnt and how much you have advanced in your career. You will realise you’ve developed new skills like interviewing, mentoring and public speaking and passions such as building workshops, becoming an inclusion and diversity ambassador, or renting unicorns in the internet. Last but not least, it is a magic role because you will help customers to build cool things using technology. You will work in very complex technical challenges and develop deep and special relationships with your customers.
But to get to that point first you need to make sure the SA role is for you, and second, pass the interview. For the first, if you liked what you read before and if you think you are a person that loves learning about new technologies and wants to get out of your comfort zone while working hard and having fun then this is the place for you. So now, I am going to focus on the second bit — interviewing for the SA role at AWS.
Interviewing at AWS is not rocket science. You won’t get asked how many golf balls can fit in a bus or to estimate the number of piano tuners in London. We want to hear from your experiences and, of course, your tech skills. Amazon, you’ll quickly realise, is a data driven company and the team wants to base its hiring decisions on objective criteria.
Tech skills
- You don’t need to know about AWS technologies — When I interview people and ask about technology I always say: “You can answer using AWS technologies or any other technology that you are familiar with”. I want to asses you based on your current skills, not on how much you study for the interview. The basics and principles of storage, networking, virtualisation, compute, databases, security are the same on-prem and in the cloud.
- AWS has products in so many different domains (Analytics, AI, Media, Containers, IOT, Database, Migration, Security, etc…) — it’s impossible for someone to know about everything, so we don’t expect you to know everything. It’s ok to say “I dont know” (Please say it before guessing or answering incorrectly). However, we do expect you to have tech foundations and to be able to dive deep in some of the topics. Moreover, it’s also important to have a holistic view of how everything fits together; after all, you will be an Architect.
- Think and draw architectures in general — How is Facebook architected? Where are the pictures stored? How are they able to respond with low latency to users around the world? Which type of database do they use and why? What data do they cache? Why is Facebook never “out for maintenance”? etc, etc, etc. Be creative and think about different business like Netflix, Alexa, amazon.com, Youtube, etc…
Leadership Principles (“LPs”)
- Our LPs are the core of our culture so a high percentage of your interview will be about LPs, so please do not underestimate this. Just think about this like therapy, where you go and talk to someone, tell stories and the therapist asks questions.
- Prepare stories in advanced that show how you have applied LPs in the past. Please give us as much context and detail as possible. We want to hear about your specific task, how you dealt with the situation, who you talked to, how you solved it and what the result was (data, numbers), dive deep in data. Don’t worry to bore us, we really need to understand the whole story to pick the LPs in your stories
I hope this is informative and wish you a very successful process. Please ask questions and drop me a message if you have feedback.
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