Amazon interview questions and the Leadership Principles

The four stages Amazon publishes

Amazon’s hiring pages set out four steps: online application, assessments, phone screening and interview loop. Amazon is explicit that the shape varies: “Our application and interview process differs from role to role.” A warehouse or customer service role may be application plus assessment plus a single conversation. A software or program management role may add a coding test, a writing sample and a full loop.

Two timelines are worth writing on a sticky note, because they are the ones Amazon itself commits to. After a phone screening: “We do our best to get back to you within two business days.” After the loop: “You can expect to hear from us within five business days.” Amazon adds that if you have not heard anything by then, you should check in with your recruiter. That is permission, in writing, to follow up.

The stage most people underestimate is the phone screening. It is not a formality or a resume read-back. Amazon says the same behavioral questions and the same Leadership Principles guide that conversation, so the preparation you do for the loop is the preparation you need before the first call.

The 16 Leadership Principles behind every question

Amazon publishes 16 Leadership Principles and says they are used “every day” to “explore new ideas, tackle challenges, and make decisions”. For candidates the operative sentence is this one: “All candidates are evaluated through the lens of these principles. One of the best ways to prepare for your interview is to reflect on how you’ve demonstrated them in your past experiences.”

The principles are Customer Obsession, Ownership, Invent and Simplify, Are Right A Lot, Learn and Be Curious, Hire and Develop the Best, Insist on the Highest Standards, Think Big, Bias for Action, Frugality, Earn Trust, Dive Deep, Have Backbone (Disagree and Commit), Deliver Results, Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer, and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility.

Read the wording on Amazon’s own page rather than a summary, because the wording is what the questions are built from. Customer Obsession says leaders “start with the customer and work backwards”. Ownership says leaders never say “that’s not my job”. Dive Deep says “no task is beneath them”. Each phrase is a story prompt: a time you started from the customer’s problem instead of your roadmap, a time you picked up work nobody owned, a time you went into the raw data yourself instead of trusting a dashboard.

A practical way to prepare is a grid. Down the side, the principles closest to your role. Across the top, three columns: situation, what you did, what changed. Six to eight filled-in rows will cover most of what a loop can ask, and one story often serves two principles depending on which part you emphasise.

The questions Amazon itself publishes

You do not have to guess at the question bank. Amazon lists example behavioral-based questions on its phone screening and interview loop pages:

Tell me about a time when you were faced with a problem that had a number of possible solutions. What was the problem and how did you determine the course of action? What was the outcome?

When did you take a risk, make a mistake, or fail? How did you respond, and how did you grow?

Describe a time you took the lead on a project.

What did you do when you needed to motivate a group of people or promote collaboration on a project?

How have you used data to develop a strategy?

Notice what these have in common. All five ask for one specific past event, and four of them ask a follow-up about the outcome or what you learned. That is the template for anything else you are asked.

Also notice what is not there. Amazon says it avoids brain teasers, giving “How many windows are in Manhattan?” as the example, and explains why: “We’ve researched this approach and have found that those types of questions are unreliable when it comes to predicting success at Amazon.” If you have been grinding logic puzzles, that time is better spent writing out stories.

How Amazon wants the answer structured

Amazon’s interview loop page describes the shape of a strong answer in four parts: context (what was going on, and what was your role), task (what you were trying to accomplish), actions (what you specifically did to move things forward) and outcome (how it turned out, and what you learned). It then says the STAR method is “one way to structure your responses, but it’s not the only way to share your experiences”, and calls it “simply a tool to help you organize your thoughts”. If you want the mechanics of that structure, see our guide to the STAR method.

Three instructions from that page are worth following literally. First, on the action step: “Be sure to focus on your individual contributions, even if you were working on a team. It’s helpful to use ‘I’ instead of ‘we’.” Second, on results: give numbers if you have them. Third, on failure: “not every story has to be a success. We know that failure is part of innovation. What matters is what you learned and how you grew.”

Amazon’s tips also add a habit almost nobody adopts on purpose: “Pause after your answer and ask if your interviewer would like more context.” That prevents both the four-minute monologue and the thirty-second answer that leaves the interviewer digging.

Here is the shape filled in, for the risk and failure question:

Situation: I ran weekly stock reporting for twelve stores, and a report I had rebuilt was overstating availability in three of them.

Task: I had to correct it before store managers ordered against the wrong numbers, and find out why it broke.

Action: I pulled the report that morning, sent a correction with the right figures and a one-line explanation, then traced the cause to a duplicated feed from a warehouse that had been renamed. I added a check that compares each store’s total against the warehouse source before the report sends, and told the two colleagues who built similar reports.

Result: No orders went out on the wrong figures. The check has caught two other feed problems since. I now treat a renamed data source as a change that needs a test, not a label change.

That answer is under 150 words, uses “I”, ends with a result and a lesson, and serves Dive Deep or Insist on the Highest Standards.

Amazon online assessment questions and work simulations

Amazon says it uses online assessments “as one way to help us get to know you better” and names two common types. Work style assessments are “centered around our peculiar culture and Leadership Principles” and “typically take 10 to 20 minutes to complete”. They ask you to pick which of two statements describes you better, with Amazon’s own example being “I like for things to be clearly structured” against “I look forward to the opportunity to learn new things”.

Work sample simulations “typically take 20 minutes to one hour” and put you in the job. Depending on the role, Amazon says the assessment “may ask you to interpret data from a chart, answer a customer question, choose how to resolve an issue, multitask, or find the right info from multiple sources”. That is the honest answer to anyone searching for an assessment answer key: there is no fixed list, because the tasks are role simulations.

On preparation Amazon is blunt. For Software Development Engineer I and II applicants it recommends reviewing its software development topics page. “For all other roles, no advance preparation is required to complete the assessment(s). Just be yourself and do your best.” On the work style items it adds: “Try not to overthink them or spend too much time on any one question.”

The logistics matter more than the content. Amazon warns that many assessments are timed, that some must be completed by a particular date, and that “If an assessment deadline is missed, we’re unable to grant extensions.” It also states that “All assessments must be completed solely by the applicant.”

The loop, the Bar Raiser and the day itself

Amazon defines the loop as meeting “individually with current employees”, where “Each person will assess different aspects of your skills and experience”. On who is in the room: “You’ll likely meet with two to seven people, this may include managers, teammates, stakeholders, and a Bar Raiser (someone from another team focused on hiring quality).” Amazon’s advice is to “Treat each interviewer the same” and not to tailor answers to their role, and it explains the typing you will see: “they’re taking detailed notes to share with the rest of the team”.

Duration is “around 45 minutes to an hour with each interviewer”, so a full loop is most of a day. Expect repetition across interviewers, and have enough stories that you are not telling the same one four times.

A few practical items Amazon publishes. If the interview is in person, “plan to arrive 15 minutes early” and bring a government-issued photo ID. On dress: “Comfortable and casual is fine”, with safety requirements such as closed-toed shoes if the role is in a fulfillment center. Remote interviews run on Zoom or Amazon Chime, with a headset recommended.

Two role-specific extras. Some roles ask for a writing sample, and Amazon explains why: “At Amazon, we write narrative memos instead of making slide decks. These memos are often read silently at the beginning of meetings and can range from one to six pages.” And “Why Amazon?” is called out as a common question, with Amazon suggesting you think about “what excites you about the role and the team (or teams) you’ll be meeting with”. Leave time for your own questions too; Amazon says it tries to keep a few minutes at the end of each interview for them.

If you are interviewing for an SDE or technical role

Amazon publishes a software development topics page for engineering candidates, and it is unusually specific. Hiring for SDEs includes “an online assessment, which includes a coding test”, and Amazon offers a sample coding challenge so you can get used to the environment. It also says most technical interviews “require you to perform coding and system design white boarding exercises”.

On language choice: “We do not require that you know any specific programming language before interviewing for a tech position. However, familiarity with a prominent language is generally a prerequisite for success.” You are expected to know the nuances too, such as how memory management works and the commonly used collections and libraries.

The topic list Amazon gives covers data structures (inner workings, runtimes, memory use), algorithms (traversals, divide and conquer, breadth-first against depth-first search and the trade-offs), object-oriented design, the trade-offs between relational and non-relational stores, distributed computing concepts such as service-oriented architectures, map-reduce, distributed caching and load balancing, operating system topics that affect performance, and the fundamentals of how the internet works from DNS lookups and TCP/IP to socket connections. On design it notes you may not be asked to describe a pattern, but “expect to have to defend your design choices”. For machine learning roles it adds train and test protocols, error analysis and statistical significance.

On the coding itself, Amazon says to “Expect to be asked to write syntactically correct code”, with no pseudo code, and recommends practising outside an integrated development environment. The evaluation criteria it names are scalable, robust and well-tested code: “Make sure that you check for edge cases and validate that no bad input can slip through.” And a reassurance that changes how you should revise: “Your interviewers won’t be evaluating your ability to memorize all of the details for each of these topics. They’ll be looking for your ability to apply what you know to solve problems efficiently and effectively.”