📋 Amazon TAM Role – Full Interview Questions (By Rounds)

Martin Coupland – LinkedIn
Decision expected in 5 days

Motivation

• What is your interest in the Amazon Technical Account Manager role?

Questions

1. Tell me about a time when you made a bad decision.
   • How did you realize that this was a bad decision?
   • How did you communicate this mistake to stakeholders? Did you create documentation and deliver training?
   • What did you learn from this mistake and how did you apply those lessons later?
   • How were your documents shared across teams and what did they include?
   • In the client documentation, did it contain standard operating procedures (SOPs)?
   • Which Amazon Leadership Principle did you demonstrate in this case? (Learn and Be Curious)
2. Tell me about a time when you were working against a client timeline.
   • How did you prioritize and decide which work was most impactful?
   • How did you identify the risk?
   • What data points helped you discover the risk?
3. Tell me about a time when you strongly disagreed with your manager.
   • What was the situation?
   • How did you use data to show your perspective to them?
   • Did they approve your approach?
   • Why did you challenge your manager?
   • What benefits did the company get from your actions?
   • What recognition did you receive?
4. Tell me about a time when you worked autonomously and contributed to the business.
   • How did you help develop or improve an AWS service?
   • How did you improve performance reviews or internal TAM tools?
   • How did you identify something that could be improved and go fix it?
   • How did you eliminate repeatable manual tasks?
   • How did you demonstrate return on investment?
   • How did you increase customer or stakeholder satisfaction?
   • How did you use data to prove the impact of your work?
   • (Reminder: all about data.)

Prabhakar Chandrasekaran – LinkedIn
Mark Vivanco – LinkedIn

Guidance: Always say “I did,” not “we did.”

Questions

1. Describe a time when you had a very difficult customer situation and explain how you handled it.
   • How did you find the cause of the issue?
   • How did the issue happen?
   • How did you resolve it?
   • How did you identify the issue?
   • What did you learn from this experience?
2. Tell me about a time when you could not complete a commitment on time.
   • What was the challenge you faced?
   • How did you overcome it?
   • What could you have done differently to meet the deadline?
   • What parameters were most important to the customer?
3. Tell me about a time when you received tough feedback from a customer, a colleague, or a manager.
   • What was the feedback?
   • How did you make the feedback positive?
   • Can you give a specific example, such as being required to put SonarQube and Quality Gates in place?
   • How did you handle the fact that it required more time and warnings but gave higher returns?
   • How did this help you solve issues before they reached production?
4. If you were migrating an application from on-premises to AWS, how would you approach it?
   • Which AWS services would you use to implement the migration?
   • How would you educate the client about AWS services?
   • How would you ensure the application runs well on the cloud?
   • Would you demo the services to the client?
   • How would you implement the migration while following best practices?
5. How do you balance utilization between 10 percent and 90 percent?

Carlos Bauer – LinkedIn

Questions

1. Tell me about a time when you not only met a goal but exceeded expectations.
   • What was the deadline?
   • How did you execute to exceed the goal?
   • How did you communicate your results?
2. Which pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework do you apply in your work?
   • Cost Optimization
   • Operational Excellence
   • Security
   • Reliability
   • Performance Efficiency

Sudhakar Marimuthu – Senior TAM, Storage & Security Carlos Lijeron – Strategic Accounts – LinkedIn

Guidance: Show breadth. Use numbers, data points, challenges, and explain how you overcame them. Always ask clarifying questions.

Questions

1. Tell me about a time when you realized you needed a deeper level of expertise to solve a problem.
   • What was the situation?
   • Why did you use DynamoDB?
   • Did you explore other options before choosing DynamoDB?
   • What steps did you take to learn something new?
   • How did you document and share what you learned with others?
2. How do you balance high availability, cost, and reliability in your solutions?
3. How do you approach authentication and authorization for users?

Deployment and CI/CD

• How do you ensure that a deployment is successful?
  • Which metrics do you check — health checks, error rates, latency, logs, CPU and memory usage?
  • How would you use Prometheus and Grafana dashboards and alerts?
• What are the benefits of a blue/green deployment strategy?
• What are the cost trade-offs of blue/green deployment?
• How do you ensure quality in a CI/CD pipeline?
  • What is the difference between unit testing, integration testing, and coverage testing?
• How do you enforce quality gates in Jenkins with static code analysis?
  • What exactly is a quality gate in SonarQube?

Risk Management

• How do you identify risks in a client project?
  • Do you review project scope, stakeholder engagement, technical complexity, timeline and dependencies, budget, or compliance requirements?

Cost Optimization

• What are the trade-offs between Spot Instances and Reserved Instances in AWS?
• Why would you use Karpenter together with Spot and Reserved Instances?
  • How do you check that Karpenter is working efficiently?
  • Do you measure node utilization, scaling events, Spot vs On-Demand balance?
• What are the cost and performance trade-offs between AWS Graviton processors and Intel processors?
• How do the Well-Architected Framework pillars of Cost Optimization and Operational Excellence tie into your decisions?

Architecture and Scaling

• In a stateless microservices architecture, where should data and state be stored?
  • Would you use Redis, Kafka, DynamoDB, or S3? Why?
• Why use Kafka vs why use Redis?
• How would you design a three-tier eCommerce web application for ten million global users?
  • How would you ensure reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency?
• How do you scale infrastructure to different environments (dev, test, staging, prod)?
• What is the flow to deploy infrastructure to all environments and scale differently in each?
• What is the structure of a Terraform template (provider config, variables, resources, data sources, outputs, modules, state management)?

Security

• What are best practices for securing a Terraform pipeline?
• How do you implement role-based access control across different environments in Terraform?
• In Kubernetes, how do you enforce workload isolation?
  • How do namespaces work?
  • How do Network Policies work?
• What features does AWS Shield provide?

Monitoring / Logging

• Give an example of using Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring.
  • Setup, data collection, dashboards, alerting.
  • What obstacles did you face (scaling, integration, alert fatigue)?
  • What were the outcomes (reduced downtime, faster deployments, lower costs)?
• What are unstructured logs and structured logs? What are the pros and cons of each?

Testing Tools

• What is the difference between JMeter and Selenium?
• What is Selenium with Python and how would you use it?
• What is the testing flow in CI/CD (linting, unit tests, integration tests, API tests, staging E2E, performance, regression, smoke tests)?

Communication and Business Alignment

• As a business owner, how would you communicate the benefits of containerizing an application?
• How would you containerize a legacy VM-based application?
  • What steps would you take?
  • What metrics would you measure (CPU/memory, latency, error rates, logs, startup time, storage performance)?
• How do you ensure team members follow best practices?
  • Do you use documentation, automated enforcement, code reviews, or training?