what have you done in AWS? AWS has a free tier. Sign up. You get 700+ hours to run an instance. That's enough to run one instance all month. Don't do that. Practice orchestrating multiple instances. Practice fail-over. Practice config management like Ansible/Chef/Puppet. Practice making the root drive disposable, and only putting data on a backed-up EBS data drive. Practice creating AMIs. Find some projects in Lambda on github and practice installing, configuring and monitoring them. Use SES. Use S3 lifecycle rules. Understand IAM roles. Stop using the Console - You should use the AWS CLI for everything, it's much more efficient and repeatable. Try managing some things using TerraForm. Make a website with GeoIP, CDN, where it takes markdown documents from one S3 bucket and transforms them into HTML via Lamba to another bucket. Yes, this takes time. But it won't cost more than a few bucks. More on reddit.com

I’ve actually done over 50 interviews for cloud support engineer roles, and you don’t actually have to have any AWS knowledge coming into the role (they do love to see that you have tried to learn AWS in between applying and your interview, as this goes to the “Learn and Be Curios” LP). You’ll apply for a specific ‘profile’ like Linux, Networking, Windows, Database, Deployment, etc. If applying for one of the core profiles like Linux or Networking, you’ll need to meet the bar in technical knowledge in that area. If they feel that you have a good foundation, then they can teach you everything you need to know about how AWS works. So say your applying for the Networking profile; this is my biggest suggestion: don’t focus on AWS specific knowledge such as how VPCs work, or public vs private subjects, endpoints, etc. They won’t ask you about any of that. They will test for foundational networking knowledge that is situation based and focuses on troubleshooting something that you have little visibility into (which is exactly what you will be doing). More on reddit.com

Congratulations on getting to the interview. As someone who has hired data engineers, here are some tips and pain points I see. Sometimes people will talk about what their team did. This is useful, but I really need to know what you did. What was your contribution? Why was it important? Be concise. I don't want to get confused with every detail about your industry, past company, etc. I only want enough detail to define the problem, and understand your solution. Be prepared to get into detail, and answer questions about why you did something. E.g., why did you code something in scala instead of python? I want to make sure you really understand your area. Read the leadership principles ( https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles ). Your interviewer is going to try to tie your answer to one or more LP. e.g. Does your answer demonstrate Bias for Action, Earn Trust, Deliver Results, etc. It would not hurt for you to read each one and think, what's an example of something I did that hits every LP on the list. Amazon does have good official information about interviewing at https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/in-person-interview . You should read it. Practice. Seriously. I've interviewed a couple hundred people, and even I get nervous when I'm on the other side of the desk. Disclosure - I am an Amazon employee, opinions are my own. Good Luck! --edit-- fixed broken links More on reddit.com