Start hereHow Amazon interviews work
Amazon is unusually open about what it wants. Its guide for candidates recommends answering behavioral questions with structured examples from your past work that show the Leadership Principles. So even in a technical loop, expect a large part of every interview to be stories about your past work.
Two more things Amazon says in public: it doesn’t use brain teasers, and it expects you to ask thoughtful questions at the end. Interviewers commonly split the principles between them, so each conversation may focus on two or three principles and come back to them with follow-up questions.
01The 16 Leadership Principles, decoded
Here’s what each principle is checking, in my words, with a typical question. Read the official wording too: interviewers will recognize its phrases when you echo them naturally.
| Principle | What it checks · a typical question |
|---|---|
| Customer Obsession | You start from the customer and work backwards. · “Tell me about a time you went beyond what a customer asked for.” |
| Ownership | You act for the long term and the whole company, never “that’s not my job”. · “Tell me about a time you took on something outside your role.” |
| Invent and Simplify | You find simpler ways to do things, even if the idea came from elsewhere. · “Tell me about a time you simplified a complex process.” |
| Are Right, A Lot | Good judgment: you seek other views and test your own beliefs. · “Tell me about a decision you made with incomplete data.” |
| Learn and Be Curious | You keep learning and explore new ideas. · “Tell me about something you taught yourself recently.” |
| Hire and Develop the Best | You raise the bar in hiring and help others grow. · “Tell me about someone you helped develop.” |
| Insist on the Highest Standards | You keep raising the bar and fix problems so they stay fixed. · “Tell me about a time you refused to compromise on quality.” |
| Think Big | You set a bold direction and get others behind it. · “Tell me about the most ambitious thing you’ve proposed.” |
| Bias for Action | You move fast when a decision can be reversed, and take calculated risks. · “Tell me about a time you acted without all the information.” |
| Frugality | You get more done with fewer resources. · “Tell me about a time you delivered with a limited budget or team.” |
| Earn Trust | You listen, speak candidly and admit mistakes. · “Tell me about a mistake you made and what you did about it.” |
| Dive Deep | You know the details and check the data yourself. · “Tell me about a problem you solved by digging into the data.” |
| Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit | You challenge decisions respectfully, then commit fully. · “Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager.” |
| Deliver Results | You focus on what matters and deliver despite setbacks. · “Tell me about a time you hit a goal despite an obstacle.” |
| Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer | You make work better and safer for the people around you. · “Tell me about a time you improved how your team works.” |
| Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility | You think about the wider effects of your work. · “Tell me about a time you considered the wider impact of a decision.” |
02PAR answers for Amazon
I coach two structures for behavioral answers, and nothing more complicated: PAR: Problem, Action, Result as the default, and SAR: Situation, Action, Result when a story needs more context to make sense. Both give Amazon exactly what it asks for: a real example, what you did, and a measurable result. My guide to interview questions explains why I keep it this lean.
Problem · ~20%
What was wrong or at stake, and what you were responsible for. Two or three sentences. Use SAR and start with the situation when the problem needs background.
Action · ~55%
What you did: your reasoning, the options, the trade-off and who you brought in.
Result · ~15%
What changed, with numbers wherever they’re real.
Learning · ~10%
One sentence: what you learned or would do differently. Interviewers often ask, so have it ready.
03A story bank for the whole loop
There are 16 principles, but you don’t need 16 stories. Eight to ten strong stories, each showing two or three principles, will cover a loop. A story about a failed launch you rescued can show Ownership, Dive Deep and Deliver Results, depending on which part you stress.
- Write each story once in PAR, with the numbers, in under two minutes.
- Map each story to the two or three principles it shows best.
- Have a second story for Customer Obsession, Ownership, Dive Deep and Deliver Results: they matter in almost every role.
- Include at least one real mistake (Earn Trust) and one disagreement (Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit).
- Use recent stories, from the last two or three years where you can, and at the level of the job you want.
- Interviewers share their notes before the decision, so tell different stories to different interviewers.
04Six worked examples
These examples are invented for practice. Build yours from your own results.
A. Customer Obsession
“Tell me about a time you went beyond what a customer asked for.”
ProblemAn enterprise customer asked us for a bulk export feature. Before I estimated it, I asked what they’d do with the export.
ActionThey were exporting data every week only to rebuild the same report in a spreadsheet. I worked backwards from that report, built a scheduled version of it inside the product with our designer, and tested it with two of their analysts before release.
ResultThey stopped the weekly export entirely, and three other customers with the same workaround adopted the report in the first month.
LearningI ask what the customer is trying to achieve before I build what they asked for.
Principles: Customer Obsession, Invent and Simplify. Expect: “How did you know what they really needed?” · “What did you say no to?”
B. Ownership
“Tell me about a time you took on something outside your role.”
ProblemOur nightly data pipeline failed about once a week. It belonged to another team, so everyone worked around it and nobody fixed it.
ActionI logged every failure for two weeks, traced most of them to one unhandled timeout, and wrote a fix with tests. I took it to the owning team with the data, agreed that they’d review and deploy it, and added an alert so the next failure would reach the right person.
ResultThe pipeline ran without a failure for the next quarter, and my team stopped losing half a day after each incident.
LearningIf a problem hurts my customers, it’s mine to solve, even when the code isn’t.
Principles: Ownership, Dive Deep. Expect: “How did the other team react?” · “What would you have done if they’d said no?”
C. Dive Deep
“Tell me about a problem you solved by digging into the data.”
ProblemSign-ups dropped after a release, and the dashboard showed no errors.
ActionI broke the funnel down by device and browser and found the drop came almost entirely from one mobile browser. Reproducing it on a real device showed that a new form validation script failed silently there. I shipped a fix the same day and added that browser to our automated tests.
ResultSign-ups returned to their usual level within two days, and the new test has caught two similar problems since.
LearningWhen the averages look fine, I segment the data before I trust it.
Principles: Dive Deep, Insist on the Highest Standards. Expect: “Why didn’t monitoring catch it?” · “How did you rule out other causes?”
D. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
“Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager.”
ProblemMy manager wanted to launch a feature to all users at once to hit a date we’d promised a partner.
ActionI thought a full launch was risky because the feature changed billing. I put the risk in writing, showed what a staged rollout would cost in days, and proposed launching to the partner first. My manager decided on a full launch with extra monitoring instead. I committed to that plan and set up the monitoring and the rollback steps myself.
ResultWe launched on the promised date. The monitoring caught a billing edge case in the first hour, and we rolled it back for a small group of accounts before any customer was charged wrongly.
LearningI disagree once, clearly and with data, and then I make the decision work.
Principles: Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit, Earn Trust. Expect: “Were you right in the end?” · “How did you raise it?”
E. Bias for Action
“Tell me about a time you acted without all the information.”
ProblemA supplier’s API started returning slow responses during our busiest week, and their support couldn’t say when it would be fixed.
ActionWaiting for certainty would have cost us orders. I judged that caching their responses for ten minutes was easy to reverse, so I shipped it behind a switch, told the business owners about the trade-off (slightly older prices), and set a check to switch it off once the supplier recovered.
ResultCheckout times went back to normal within the hour, and we switched the cache off three days later when the supplier fixed their side.
LearningI move fast when a decision is easy to undo, and slow down when it isn’t.
Principles: Bias for Action, Customer Obsession. Expect: “What was the risk?” · “Who did you tell, and when?”
F. Earn Trust
“Tell me about a mistake you made.”
ProblemI gave a stakeholder a delivery date before I’d checked a dependency on another team, and the date slipped by two weeks.
ActionAs soon as I knew, I told the stakeholder myself, explained what I’d missed, and gave a new date based on a plan the other team had confirmed. I then changed how I estimate: I list the dependencies and confirm them before I commit to a date.
ResultWe delivered on the new date, and the stakeholder asked me to lead the next project with their team.
LearningBad news travels best early and in person.
Principles: Earn Trust, Ownership. Expect: “How did they react?” · “What do you do differently now?”
05Follow-up questions
Amazon interviewers rarely stop at your first answer. They dig into one part of the story to check it’s yours and to see how deep your knowledge goes. That’s normal, and it’s often where a strong candidate stands out.
- “What exactly did you do?” Name your actions with “I”, step by step.
- “How did you measure that?” Give the metric and the source, or say honestly how you judged it.
- “What were the other options?” Name two and say why you chose the one you did.
- “What would you do differently?” Have one real answer, not “nothing”.
- “Who disagreed?” Say who, why, and how you handled it.
If you don’t remember a detail, say so and give the closest thing you do know. Guessing is worse than “I don’t remember the exact number, but it was roughly half”, especially with a Bar Raiser in the room.
06Language that shows ownership
| Instead of | Try |
|---|---|
| “We decided to…” | “I proposed… and the team agreed.” |
| “It was a team effort.” | “The team built it. My part was…” |
| “We improved performance a lot.” | “We cut page load time from four seconds to under one.” |
| “I always…” | “Here’s one specific time…” |
| “It wasn’t my fault.” | “My part in it was… Here’s what I changed.” |
| Situation | Phrases |
|---|---|
| Starting a story | “The situation was…” · “I was responsible for…” |
| Your actions | “The first thing I did was…” · “I looked at the data and saw…” · “I decided to… because…” |
| Trade-offs | “The options were X or Y. I chose X because…” · “The risk was…, so I…” |
| The result | “As a result, … went from A to B.” · “We measured it by…” |
| Disagreeing | “I raised the risk with… and showed…” · “Once we decided, I committed to…” |
| Learning | “What I learned was…” · “Next time, I’d…” |
07A seven-day practice plan
Day 1 · Principles
Read the principles and list ten stories from your last two or three years.
Day 2 · PAR
Write each story in PAR, with your actions in “I”.
Day 3 · Numbers and mapping
Add the real numbers and map each story to two or three principles.
Day 4 · Out loud
Tell every story out loud with a timer. Cut anything over two minutes.
Day 5 · Follow-ups
For each story, answer the five follow-up questions above.
Day 6 · Mock loop
A full mock interview with someone who will dig into your answers.
Day 7 · Rest
Review your story map and your questions for them. Then stop.
08Interview-day checklist
- I have eight to ten stories, each mapped to two or three principles
- Every story fits into two minutes, with the action in “I”
- Every result has a real number or a precise description
- I have a mistake story and a disagreement story
- I know what I’d do differently in each story
- I’ll use different stories with different interviewers
- I have three thoughtful questions for each interviewer
- For a video interview: camera, microphone and connection tested