The short answer: Amazon’s interviews are built around its 16 Leadership Principles. According to Amazon’s own interview prep, each interviewer “will typically ask two or three behavioral-based questions” about how you’ve shown those principles in past jobs. Answer each with the STAR method (situation, task, action, result), using “I” for your own actions and numbers in the result. Prepare one or two stories for each principle, expect deep follow-up questions, and know that one interviewer, the Bar Raiser, is there to keep the hiring bar high across Amazon, not just for the team. Below are all 16 principles with a sample question for each, five sample answers, the Bar Raiser’s role and how the process works.
How Amazon interviews work
- The focus is behavioral. Amazon’s prep page for software engineers says “A significant portion of the conversation will focus on how you’ve demonstrated our Leadership Principles in your past jobs.”
- Answers need data. In Amazon’s words: “Amazon is a data-driven company, so your answers should include metrics or data where applicable.”
- The loop is several interviews in a row. Amazon describes the loop as meeting “individually with current employees.” Amazon’s own interview guide says loops are typically four to six interviews of 45 to 60 minutes; for SDE II roles, Amazon’s prep page says four 55-minute interviews.
- Technical roles add technical rounds (coding, system design, or role-specific exercises), but the Leadership Principle questions run through all of them.
The 16 Leadership Principles, with a sample question for each
These are Amazon’s 16 principles as listed on amazon.jobs, with a short summary in our words and a typical question.
| Principle | In short | Sample question |
|---|---|---|
| Customer Obsession | Start with the customer and work backwards | Tell me about a time you went above and beyond for a customer. |
| Ownership | Act for the long term and never say “that’s not my job” | Tell me about a time you took on something outside your role. |
| Invent and Simplify | Find new ideas and make things simpler | Tell me about a time you simplified a complex process. |
| Are Right, A Lot | Strong judgment and seeking out different views | Tell me about a time you made a decision with incomplete data. |
| Learn and Be Curious | Keep learning and exploring new possibilities | Tell me about a time you learned a new skill quickly to solve a problem. |
| Hire and Develop the Best | Raise the bar with each hire and coach others | Tell me about a time you helped a colleague grow. |
| Insist on the Highest Standards | Keep raising the bar on quality | Tell me about a time you refused to compromise on quality. |
| Think Big | Set a bold direction that inspires results | Tell me about a time you proposed a much bigger goal than expected. |
| Bias for Action | Speed matters; many decisions are reversible | Tell me about a time you acted quickly without all the information. |
| Frugality | Accomplish more with less | Tell me about a time you delivered a result with limited resources. |
| Earn Trust | Listen, speak candidly and admit mistakes | Tell me about a time you had to deliver bad news. |
| Dive Deep | Stay close to the details and question the numbers | Tell me about a time you found the root cause of a problem others missed. |
| Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit | Challenge decisions respectfully, then commit fully | Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager. |
| Deliver Results | Deliver the key inputs on time despite setbacks | Tell me about a time you met a goal despite a major obstacle. |
| Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer | Build a safer, fairer, more supportive workplace | Tell me about a time you improved your team’s working environment. |
| Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility | Consider the wider effects of your work | Tell me about a time you considered the impact of a decision beyond your team. |
Read the full text of each principle on amazon.jobs before your interview. The wording matters, and interviewers will listen for it.
How to answer: STAR, the Amazon way
Amazon recommends the STAR method:
- Situation: the context, briefly.
- Task: what you were responsible for.
- Action: what you did, step by step. This should be most of the answer.
- Result: what happened, with numbers, and what you learned.
Amazon’s interview guide suggests answers of about two to three minutes each, with precise metrics and “I” statements to make your own contribution clear. Three things matter more at Amazon than elsewhere:
- “I,” not “we.” If you say “we,” expect “What did you do?”
- Data. “Reduced response time from 48 hours to 6,” not “made it faster.”
- Follow-ups. Amazon says interviewers focus on “the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of your experiences, as well as the ‘why’ of your decisions.” Know the details of every story: the numbers, the alternatives you considered, what you’d do differently.
Sample answers
Examples are illustrations, not quotes from real candidates. Use your own stories.
Customer Obsession: “Tell me about a time you went above and beyond for a customer.”
“S: I was an account manager for a mid-sized retailer whose online orders kept failing at checkout during a sale weekend. T: Our support team had logged it as a low-priority bug, but the customer was losing sales every hour. A: I escalated it to the on-call engineering lead with the customer’s order data, stayed on a call with the customer’s team through the evening to test fixes, and sent them hourly updates. R: The fix went live that night. The customer recovered most of the weekend’s projected sales and renewed their contract three months later at a higher tier. I also proposed a rule that checkout failures for any account during a sale are automatically high priority, and it was adopted.”
Bias for Action: “Tell me about a time you acted quickly without all the information.”
“S: Our warehouse’s delivery scanner software started crashing on a Monday morning, the busiest day. T: As shift lead, I had to keep 400 orders moving. A: Rather than wait for the vendor’s root cause, I switched two lines to manual scanning with printed pick lists within 20 minutes, since that was easily reversible, and kept the other lines running while IT restarted the scanners in rotation. R: We shipped 97% of the day’s orders on time. The vendor found the cause the next day, and I wrote up the manual fallback as a standard procedure.”
Dive Deep: “Tell me about a time you found the root cause of a problem others missed.”
“S: Our monthly churn report showed a sudden rise in cancellations. T: Leadership assumed a competitor’s price cut and asked me to model a discount. A: Before modeling anything, I broke the cancellations down by signup date, plan and payment method. Almost all the increase came from customers whose cards had expired, and our payment retry emails had stopped sending after a system update. R: We fixed the emails the same week and recovered about 60% of those accounts. The discount we’d planned would have cost far more and fixed nothing.”
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit: “Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager.”
“S: My manager wanted to launch a new feature to all users at once. T: I was the product analyst, and I believed a staged rollout was safer. A: I brought data from our last two launches, where issues showed up in the first 5% of users, and proposed a one-week rollout at 10%. She heard me out but decided to launch to everyone because of a marketing commitment. I committed fully: I built a live dashboard for the launch and set up alerts. R: A performance issue did appear on day two, and because the alerts caught it within an hour, we fixed it before most users noticed. Afterward, we agreed on a staged rollout policy for major launches.” See our guide to handling conflict.
Learn and Be Curious: “Tell me about a time you learned something new to solve a problem.”
“S: Our team was spending about 10 hours a week copying data between spreadsheets for a weekly report. T: Nobody on the team knew how to automate it, and there was no budget for a tool. A: I took an online Python course in the evenings over three weeks and wrote a script that pulled the data and built the report. I documented it and trained two colleagues to run it. R: The report now takes 20 minutes, and we’ve used the same approach for two other reports.”
Build your story bank
A Bar Raiser quoted in an Amazon article advises candidates to “identify one or two work anecdotes that are relevant to each one” of the principles. You don’t need 32 different stories; one strong story can cover two or three principles. A practical plan:
- List eight to ten of your best work stories: a big win, a failure, a disagreement, a customer problem, a time you moved fast, a time you went deep into data, a time you helped someone grow, a time you did more with less.
- Map each story to the principles it shows. Make sure every principle has at least one story.
- Write each in STAR form, with the numbers.
- Include failures. Amazon’s Bar Raisers look for candidates who can admit when things didn’t go to plan and learn from it. See tell me about a time you failed.
- Practice out loud, including the follow-ups: “What would you do differently?” “What data did you use?” “What did your manager think?”
What is a Bar Raiser?
Amazon describes its Bar Raiser program as one that “empowers Amazon employees to serve as objective third-party advisers during the interview process.” Its goal, according to Amazon, is to help make sure every new hire “brings skills and abilities that are better than 50% of their would-be peers in similar roles.”
According to Amazon, Bar Raisers are nominated by colleagues and trained on the Leadership Principles, including by shadowing experienced Bar Raisers over several months. They aren’t part of the team you’d join, so they judge the hire for Amazon as a whole, and they take part in the debrief and the final decision with the hiring manager. You may not know which interviewer is the Bar Raiser, so treat every interview the same way.
The Amazon interview process
The steps vary by role and level, but Amazon’s own interview guide describes a typical path:
- Application: a resume that matches the job description.
- Phone screen: a 30- to 45-minute call with a recruiter or hiring manager, which can include behavioral and role-specific questions.
- The interview loop: several back-to-back interviews, in person or by video, each focused on a few Leadership Principles and, for technical roles, a technical skill.
- Debrief and decision: the panel meets after your final interview to evaluate you against the Leadership Principles and the role’s requirements.
Some roles add an online assessment before the interviews, and hourly roles often have a shorter process. Your recruiter will tell you what to expect.
Frequently asked questions
How many Leadership Principles does Amazon have?
How do I use the STAR method in an Amazon interview?
What is an Amazon Bar Raiser?
How many stories should I prepare for an Amazon interview?
How many interviews are in the Amazon loop?
Sources
- Amazon, Leadership Principles. Read on 30 September 2026.
- Amazon, SDE II Interview Prep and Interview Loop. Read on 30 September 2026.
- About Amazon, What is an Amazon Bar Raiser?. Read on 30 September 2026.
- About Amazon, 8 interview tips from Amazon Bar Raisers. Read on 30 September 2026.
- About Amazon, Your complete guide to the Amazon interview process. Read on 30 September 2026.
