Amazon Leadership Principles: Interview Questions for Each

The Amazon Leadership Principles are 16 short statements, from Customer Obsession to Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility, that Amazon uses as the scoring rubric for its interviews. Its interview loop guide says it plainly: "All candidates are evaluated through the lens of these principles" (Amazon). This guide gives each principle in Amazon's own words, pairs it with the questions Amazon's role-by-role prep pages publish, adds a short sample STAR outline for each, and shows how a loop divides the principles between interviewers. For the application, assessments and timelines, see our Amazon hiring process guide.

The principles, in Amazon's words

Amazon publishes the list on its Leadership Principles page. On 1 July 2021, CNBC reported that Amazon had "added two new entries to its set of 14 leadership principles," and that it had not updated the list since 2015, "when it added a 14th principle, 'Learn and Be Curious.'"

*Amazon's prep page for legal roles says: "There are four Leadership Principles that won't come up unless you are interviewing for a management position: Frugality, Hire and Develop the Best, Strive to be Earth's Best Employer, and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility." That page is written for legal candidates, and Amazon's other role pages do not repeat the list, so treat it as a strong hint rather than a rule for every team.

How Amazon uses them in interviews

The principles start at the phone screen, where Amazon's phone screening guide says questions ask about past situations "using Leadership Principles to guide the discussion."

In the loop, the principles are split between interviewers. Amazon's role pages repeat one line almost word for word: the loop covers competencies "based off of our Leadership Principles, which different interviewers will be assigned to evaluate." The legal page is more specific: "Each interviewer is assigned at least one Leadership Principle," and "You should expect a lot of follow-up questions." Most of the role pages add that "Each interviewer will typically ask two or three behavioral-based questions."

The loop's size depends on the role. From Amazon's own prep pages:

The arithmetic is worth doing once. Five interviewers asking two or three behavioral questions each comes to 10 to 15 principle questions in a single day, each with follow-ups. If the four management principles are off the table, 12 principles remain, so most could be probed at least once and some twice. That is why a handful of polished stories is not enough.

Principle by principle: likely questions and a STAR outline

Amazon does not tag its sample questions by principle. The questions below are quoted from Amazon's prep pages; the pairings are ours, made from each principle's wording. The STAR outlines are samples written for this post, not real answers. Our STAR method guide covers the format itself.

1. Customer Obsession

Amazon: "Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust."

• From Amazon: "Who are you designing for? Why?" and "What expectations does your customer have in terms of functionality?" (system design, SDE II). "Your manager calls to say a client is complaining that the service you provide isn't working. What would you do?" (SDM).
• Sample outline. S: support tickets about failed refunds doubled after a release. T: you owned the refund flow. A: you read 40 tickets, found one confusing error message, rewrote it and added a retry. R: refund tickets fell back to the old level within two weeks.

2. Ownership

Amazon: "They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say 'that's not my job.'"

• From Amazon: "Describe a time you took the lead on a project" (phone screen). The TPM page asks you to "own the entire product release life cycle" (TPM).
• Sample outline. S: a shared dashboard broke every Monday and no team claimed it. T: you used it but did not own it. A: you traced the failure to an upstream job, fixed it, wrote a runbook and handed it to the owning team. R: no Monday failures for the rest of the quarter.

3. Invent and Simplify

Amazon: "Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify."

• From Amazon: "What's the most innovative idea you've ever come up with?" and, for the writing sample, "a time when you were able to simplify the lives of customers" (TPM).
• Sample outline. S: new hires took two weeks to get a working dev environment. T: you were asked to onboard three people. A: you scripted the setup into one command and cut the wiki page from 30 steps to 4. R: setup took one afternoon for the next hires.

4. Are Right, A Lot

Amazon: "They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs."

• From Amazon: "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?" (phone screen).
• Sample outline. S: two vendors for a data pipeline, the team leaning toward the cheaper one. T: you had to recommend one. A: you wrote down what would prove you wrong, asked an engineer who disliked your pick to test it, and ran both on a week of real data. R: the cheaper one dropped records, and you changed your recommendation.

5. Learn and Be Curious

Amazon: "Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves."

• From Amazon: "When did you take a risk, make a mistake, or fail? How did you respond, and how did you grow?" (phone screen). The TPM page asks how you "assess the impact of emerging technologies on feature use cases."
• Sample outline. S: your class project's model overfit badly. T: you were the one who chose the approach. A: you took a short course on validation, rebuilt the split and documented what you got wrong. R: the final score dropped on paper but held on new data, and you now set up validation first.

6. Hire and Develop the Best

Amazon: "Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion... Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others."

• From Amazon: "Tell me about the best hire you've ever made. What qualities do you look for most?" (SDM).
• Sample outline. S: a junior analyst kept missing deadlines. T: as their lead, you could escalate or coach. A: you set weekly goals, paired on two projects and gave them a client meeting to run. R: they shipped the next three reports on time and were promoted the following cycle.

7. Insist on the Highest Standards

Amazon: "Leaders have relentlessly high standards... Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed."

• From Amazon: "Can you tell me an instance where you drove an operational excellence change on your team?" (SDM). The TPM page asks you to show "your commitment to maintaining the highest standards throughout the process."
• Sample outline. S: the same billing bug came back three times. T: you were on call for the third. A: you refused a quick patch, wrote a test that reproduced it and added a release check. R: it did not recur in the next six months.

8. Think Big

Amazon: "Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results."

• From Amazon: "Walk us through your approach to create a strategy and roadmap for your programs" (TPM). In design rounds: "What happens if we become hyper-popular? What does twice the growth look like? Or ten times the growth?" (SDE II).
• Sample outline. S: your team fixed one store's inventory errors by hand. T: you were asked to fix the next store. A: you proposed one tool for all 200 stores, wrote a one-page plan and got a pilot of five. R: the pilot cut manual counts by half and was funded for the region.

9. Bias for Action

Amazon: "Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking."

• From Amazon: "Tell me about a time when you worked under a tight deadline" (CSM) and "Tell me about a time you needed to make a decision with very little data" (legal).
• Sample outline. S: a supplier missed a delivery two days before an event. T: you ran logistics. A: you booked a backup supplier on a refundable deposit within the hour, then kept negotiating with the first. R: the event ran on time, and the deposit came back.

10. Frugality

Amazon: "Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention."

• From Amazon: no published sample question fits this principle, and the legal page lists it among the management-only four.
• Sample outline. S: your team lost its testing budget mid-year. T: releases still had to go out. A: you moved tests to existing spare machines and dropped two paid tools nobody used. R: the same release schedule at a fraction of the cost.

11. Earn Trust

Amazon: "Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing."

• From Amazon: "What did you do when you needed to motivate a group of people or promote collaboration on a project?" (phone screen). On failure questions, Amazon's legal and PM pages say "it's okay to be self-critical."
• Sample outline. S: you sent a client the wrong figures. T: nobody else had noticed. A: you told your manager and the client the same day, sent the corrected file and explained how you would check in future. R: the client renewed and asked for you by name.

12. Dive Deep

Amazon: "Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ."

• From Amazon: "How have you used data to develop a strategy?" (phone screen) and "How do you debug and resolve operational events?" (SDM).
• Sample outline. S: the weekly report showed satisfaction up while complaints rose. T: you owned the report. A: you pulled the raw survey data and found a change had excluded unhappy customers. R: you fixed the filter and the team reset its targets.

13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

Amazon: "Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree... Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly."

• From Amazon: "Tell me about a time when you pushed back against a decision that impacted your team" (CSM and legal).
• Sample outline. S: your manager wanted to ship without load testing. T: you thought it risky. A: you showed last year's outage numbers and asked for one day; when the answer was no, you built the rollback plan yourself. R: launch hit a spike, and the rollback took ten minutes.

14. Deliver Results

Amazon: "Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion."

• From Amazon: "Tell me about your most challenging project" (CSM) and "Give examples of how you've followed through on projects and gathered metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your solutions" (BIE).
• Sample outline. S: a migration was three weeks behind with a fixed cutover date. T: you led the final phase. A: you cut scope to the must-have tables, split work by owner and reported daily. R: cutover on the date, with the rest moved two weeks later.

15. Strive to be Earth's Best Employer

Amazon: "Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy."

• From Amazon: no published sample question fits; it is one of the legal page's management-only four.
• Sample outline. S: your team's on-call load fell on two people. T: you managed the rotation. A: you measured pages per person, spread the rotation and fixed the three noisiest alerts. R: pages per person fell and nobody left the team that year.

16. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

Amazon: "We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions... Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them."

• From Amazon: no published sample question fits; it is also on the management-only list.
• Sample outline. S: a feature your team launched sent extra traffic to a partner's small site. T: it was not your system. A: you contacted them, added rate limits and shared the fix. R: their errors stopped, and the limit became a team default.

Building a story bank that covers all of them

Amazon's own Leadership Principles worksheet is the best template. It has three steps: list 10 to 15 significant professional experiences, recall each one in STAR detail with prompts such as "What did you personally own?" and "What trade-offs did you have to make to achieve this?", then mark which principles each one shows. It also warns: "Don't try to squeeze in an example from your list if it doesn't really address what the interviewer is asking."

The legal prep page sets the coverage target: "have at least two anecdotes for each," keep each to "3 - 5 minutes," and avoid reuse, because "Using the same example multiple times may make your experience seem narrower than it is."

The math: 12 principles times two stories is 24 slots. A strong story usually shows two or three principles, so 10 to 12 stories can fill the grid, which matches the worksheet's 10 to 15. Copy this grid and fill it in (sample rows, invented):

Fill the "Used with" column during the loop, so the same story does not go to two interviewers. For more prompts by theme, see our list of behavioral interview questions.

Bar raisers and loop structure

Amazon's interview loop guide says you will likely meet two to seven people, which "may include managers, teammates, stakeholders, and a Bar Raiser (someone from another team focused on hiring quality)," and around 45 minutes to an hour with each.

What the Bar Raiser does, from Amazon's own articles:

• "A Bar Raiser is an interviewer at Amazon who is brought into hiring loops as an objective third party," whose job is to "assess candidates for the specific role and for long-term success at Amazon" (About Amazon).
• The standard behind the name: "Every person hired should be better than 50 percent of those currently in similar roles" (same article).
• There are "More than 3,600 Bar Raisers at Amazon," nominated by "their manager, peers, or other Bar Raisers," who train by "shadowing veteran Bar Raisers for multiple interview cycles over the course of several months." The Bar Raiser, "With hiring manager, makes final hiring decision" (About Amazon).

Amazon's loop guide also says "Treat each interviewer the same," adding that "it's not necessary to tailor your answers based on their role." Prepare every story for someone who has never heard of your team and will ask why, how and what the number was.

Where ApplyEze fits

Amazon applications go through amazon.jobs, which is not one of the platforms ApplyEze completes, so an Amazon application is one you submit yourself. ApplyEze helps with the rest of a search: it watches the career boards of more than 100,000 employers and writes a resume for each posting, and a cover letter when the form asks for one. ICE's SEVIS by the Numbers 2024 also lists Amazon as the top STEM OPT employer in 2024, with 6,679 students.