Amazon Leadership Principles Interview

Role: Software Engineer

Amazon's behavioral interviews are entirely structured around their 16 Leadership Principles (LPs). Every round — OA, phone screen, and each loop interview — includes LP questions. Preparing specific, quantified stories for each LP is the single most important thing you can do.

The Interview Structure

OA: 2 LC questions + a workstyle/behavioral section (scenario-based LP questions where you pick the most/least like you).

Phone Screen: ~15 min behavioral (LP questions) + ~45 min coding (LC easy–medium). Usually one interviewer.

The Loop: 3–5 back-to-back 1-hour interviews (15 min break between each). Each has:

• 15–20 min LP behavioral
• 30–40 min coding (LC medium, sometimes with follow-ups)
• One interviewer in the loop is a Bar Raiser — an independent interviewer from another team with veto power. You won't know who it is. Expect harder LP pushback and trickier follow-up questions.

Don't reuse stories across interviewers. All loop interviewers debrief together and will flag repeated scenarios.

The 16 Leadership Principles

Know these cold. For interns and new grads, interviewers weight these LPs most heavily:

STAR Format — Amazon Style

Amazon interviewers push back on shallow STAR answers. Expect follow-ups like:

• "Why did you make that choice specifically?"
• "What would you have done differently?"
• "What was the measurable impact?"

Structure your answers:

• Situation: 1–2 sentences max — context only
• Task: What you were responsible for
• Action: The bulk of your answer — focus on your decisions and why
• Result: Quantify. "Reduced latency by 40%", "shipped 2 weeks early", "saved 3 engineer-hours/week"

Sample Questions by LP

Customer Obsession

• Tell me about a time you went out of your way to improve the experience for a customer or user.
• Describe a decision where you prioritized the customer even when it was harder.

Ownership

• Tell me about a time you took on something outside your responsibility.
• Describe a time a project was failing and what you did about it.

Dive Deep

• Tell me about a time you used data to challenge an assumption.
• Describe a time you found a root cause others had missed.

Invent and Simplify

• Tell me about a time you simplified a process or system.
• Describe a creative solution you built from scratch.

Bias for Action

• Tell me about a time you had to make a decision with incomplete information.
• Describe a time you moved quickly when others hesitated.

Learn and Be Curious

• Tell me about something technical you taught yourself recently.
• Describe a time you received feedback that changed how you work.

Common Mistakes

• Saying "we" without clarifying your specific role
• Answers with no measurable result ("things improved")
• Reusing the same story for different LPs
• Not having a story for every major LP — interviewers will ask about ones you're not ready for
• Shallow answers that don't survive follow-up questions

Coding Rounds

Expect LC easy to medium. Common patterns across candidates:

• Graphs (cycle detection, BFS/DFS)
• Arrays/heaps (top-k elements, greedy)
• Two pointers / sliding window
• Backtracking (medium)

Talk through your approach before coding. Amazon interviewers will often give hints toward the optimal solution if you explain your brute force clearly. Good code structure and naming matter — interviewers note code quality.

Variant (independent report) — AWS Manager Round, Onsite (Fall 2026 Intern)

One candidate's manager round at an AWS in-person onsite (East Palo Alto) went beyond pure LP questions. The interviewer "just grilled me on STAR and asked me to design the systems I worked on and what I can do." Specifics reported:

• Deep STAR-format grilling on the candidate's own past projects
• "Design the systems you worked on" — asked to explain/design the systems from the candidate's resume
• Rapid tech trivia: "What is RAG? What is gRPC?"
• GenAI pushback: the candidate described RAG as their GenAI solution; the interviewer countered "that is not GenAI — what have you created with GenAI?" and was dismissive/confused when the candidate pivoted to agentic development

Takeaway: for AWS manager rounds, expect STAR behavioral plus resume-system design plus quick tech trivia (RAG, gRPC, concrete GenAI experience) — have crisp definitions and a real GenAI artifact you built.

Source: community report, June 2026