How to prepare for an Amazon Leadership Principles interview

Are you preparing for Amazon by memorizing the Leadership Principles and hoping you can name one when a question sounds close? Then an interviewer asks about a time you had to make a decision without enough information, you tell a story you're proud of, and they spend the next twelve minutes asking what the numbers were, who disagreed with you, and what you'd do differently. Those twelve minutes are where most of your score gets decided, and almost nobody prepares for them.

This article covers what the Leadership Principles are for inside Amazon, and how interviewers score your answers against them. It also covers how to build a story bank for the principles you'll be asked about, and the follow-up questions almost nobody rehearses. Read it once, then spend the rest of your prep writing and saying stories out loud, because the failure mode here is having good experience and no organized way to talk about it.

The advice comes from Ethan Evans, who spent 15 years at Amazon rising to vice president, did more than a thousand interviews there, and hired roughly a thousand people; Dave Anderson, who went from junior manager to tech director at Amazon over 12 years and served as a bar raiser; and Bill Carr, who spent 15 years at Amazon, launched Amazon Music and Prime Video, was also a bar raiser, and co-wrote Working Backwards. Every quote plays the exact moment it was said.

One scoping note before we start. Loop structures, round counts, and the number of principles all change over time, and Amazon has revised the list more than once. This article teaches the evaluation model, which has been stable for close to two decades, rather than a current org chart. Read the principles on Amazon's own careers site before your loop, since a blog's copy of the list may be a version or two old.

What the Leadership Principles are actually for

Plenty of companies publish a list of values that nobody uses after onboarding. Amazon built processes around theirs. Evans, who joined in 2005 and left as a VP in 2020, describes three places the principles get used: hiring, annual reviews, and promotion documents. That's why they carry real weight in your interview instead of being a warm-up topic.

Two things follow from that. First, the questions that feel random are not random. The interviewer has an assignment, and they need evidence on those specific principles before the hour is up. Second, coverage matters more than you'd guess. If your best stories all demonstrate the same two or three principles, several interviewers will walk out of your loop with thin notes, and thin notes give the debrief very little to work with.

Anderson, who worked at Amazon for 12 years and wrote one of the most-read public explanations of the principles, says the reason they hold up in interviews is that they describe behavior rather than skill. He points at ownership as the one that pulls the others along.

That's the test hiding inside a lot of these questions. Did you do the thing because it was assigned to you, or because you decided it was yours? An interviewer can hear the difference in about two sentences.

How much of the loop this decides

More than candidates expect. Evans is direct about the trade Amazon makes between hard skills and behavior, and he was on the hiring side of it for 15 years.

Domain questions still happen, and in a technical loop they take real time. But a candidate who codes well and gives vague, credit-sharing answers about their past work tends to lose to a candidate who codes fine and can show exactly what they decided and why. If you're allocating prep hours, don't give the behavioral part the leftovers.

Worth knowing where the principles rank against each other, too. Evans points out the list runs from customer obsession at the top to delivering results at the bottom, and that Amazonians joke about which one really counts.

Translate that into story selection. A story where you handled a process beautifully and shipped nothing is a weak story, whatever principle it was meant to demonstrate. Pick stories that ended in something happening.

Building a story bank

What you're preparing is a set of stories rather than a set of answers. Evans puts it plainly when someone asks how to signal that you match a company's principles without sounding like you're name-dropping them.

How many stories, and how to map them

Aim for eight to twelve stories from the last three to five years, written down. That sounds like a lot until you realize a good story covers two or three principles at once. A project you pushed through against internal resistance can serve ownership, backbone, and bias for action depending on which part you emphasize.

Then build the grid. List the current principles down one side and your stories across the top, and mark which stories can credibly serve which principle. The gaps are the point of the exercise. If nothing in your bank shows frugality, or dive deep, or earning trust after you got something wrong, you have a hole that an assigned interviewer will land on. Go find an example from further back, or accept that you'll answer that one thinly and put your energy elsewhere.

What belongs in each story

Amazon interviewers are trained on behavioral interviewing and take notes in a STAR-shaped structure: situation, task, action, result. The version candidates give is usually too short at both ends. They spend three minutes on background and then say "and it worked out well."

The numbers matter more here than in most interview formats, because "be right a lot" and "dive deep" are principles someone will be assigned to test, and both get tested by asking how you knew. Our playbook on writing impact into resume bullets covers how to dig up metrics for work you did years ago, and those same numbers become the backbone of your spoken stories.

The follow-up questions nobody rehearses

Your opening answer is mostly raw material. The interviewer takes it and starts digging, and what they find is what they write down. Bill Carr, who spent 15 years at Amazon and interviewed as a bar raiser, describes spending an entire hour on a single example.

Carr says he's trying to understand everything from the situation to the result, including who the candidate influenced, what decisions they made, and what roadblocks they hit. So prepare for the drilling, not the opener. For each story in your bank, have answers ready for these:

Two of those deserve extra attention. "Who disagreed with you" is a disguised test of have backbone, disagree and commit, which both Carr and Anderson describe as the principle people understand worst. Anderson's version: you argue hard, you lose, and then you go make the decision succeed without ever saying "I told you so." If nobody ever pushed back on you, the interviewer concludes either that the project didn't matter much or that you avoid conflict.

And "what was your specific contribution" catches most people, because normal professional courtesy trains you to say we. Describe your team's work honestly, then be precise about which parts you decided, wrote, negotiated, or unblocked.

What the bar raiser does

Somewhere in your loop is an interviewer who doesn't work for the hiring manager and has no stake in filling the role. Carr, who was one, explains the design.

Carr says the role started in 1999 because Amazon was growing so fast that new hires were hiring new hires, and everyone was importing whatever standards they'd used at their last company. The bar raiser exists to counterweight a hiring manager's urgency to fill the seat, and to hold the debrief to the written criteria rather than gut feel.

What that means for you as a candidate is small but useful. You cannot tell which interviewer is the bar raiser, and guessing is a waste of attention. They're often not the most senior person on your schedule, and Carr notes it's a good role for people earlier in their careers. Assume every interviewer's notes get read out and challenged, and don't save your best material for whoever looks most important.

It also explains why consistency matters across the whole day. If you tell two interviewers versions of the same project with different numbers in them, the bar raiser will catch it in the debrief, because that's the job. Our final-round playbook covers managing a full day of interviews as one performance.

Where candidates lose points

Evans and Anderson have each sat through hundreds of debriefs. The failure patterns repeat.

If your instinct is to soften your own role because claiming credit feels arrogant, that's worth practicing away from before the loop. Our behavioral interview questions playbook has the general version of this problem, and the fix is the same: describe the work accurately, then say which parts were your calls.

If you've never worked at Amazon

Most candidates haven't, and the principles were written to describe how anyone competent works rather than anything Amazon-specific. Anderson, who has watched other companies adopt the list wholesale for their own interviews, argues they're a clear way to name behaviors any employer wants. Your experience translates fine. You just have to frame it so an Amazon interviewer can score it.

One more thing that explains why Amazon interviews feel the way they do. The company runs on written narratives instead of slide decks, and Carr describes the point of that as forcing people to expose their thinking deeply rather than gesturing at a concept. The interview is the same instinct applied to your history. Nobody is going to accept a headline. They want the reasoning underneath it, which is exactly what your written story bank is for.

Frequently asked questions

How many Leadership Principles are there?

The list has grown over the years, from ten in the early 2000s to fourteen and then sixteen. Because it changes, read the current list on Amazon's own careers site rather than a summary somewhere else. Evans notes that Amazon added principles as recently as the 2020s and that interviewers historically ask less about the newest additions, so weight your prep toward the long-standing ones like customer obsession, ownership, dive deep, bias for action, and have backbone.

Should I say the name of the principle in my answer?

Only if it fits the sentence. Evans says a really skilled candidate can work the words in and that if you can't do it naturally, don't worry about it. Interviewers are listening for behavior, not vocabulary. A place it does work well is the questions-for-us section at the end, where you can say a specific principle resonates with you and explain why.

What if I don't have a story for one of the principles?

Go further back in your history before giving up, including school, volunteer work, or side projects if you're early in your career. If there's genuinely nothing, don't fabricate one, because the follow-up questions will take it apart. Answer honestly with the closest real thing you have and say what you'd do in that situation now. A thin answer costs you less than an invented one that collapses under drilling.

How long should each answer be?

Aim for about two minutes on the opening answer, then let the interviewer steer. You're leaving room on purpose. They have follow-ups queued and a limited hour, and a six-minute monologue eats the time they need to gather evidence.

Is the STAR method still the right structure?

Yes, though treat it as a checklist for what to include rather than a script to recite. Carr describes using it to understand everything from the situation to the result and everything in between. Just make sure the actions and the result get most of your airtime, because that's what the interviewer is scoring.

How much prep time does this take?

Writing eight to twelve stories properly takes a few evenings. Saying them out loud with someone asking follow-ups takes several more sessions, and that's the part people skip. Evans points out the asymmetry bluntly: your interviewer may have done a thousand interviews and you've done ten, so practice is how you close some of that gap.

Does this apply to companies other than Amazon?

The principles themselves show up elsewhere, since Anderson says he knows companies that took Amazon's list directly into their own interview process. More usefully, the preparation method works anywhere: build a mapped story bank, put numbers in it, and rehearse the follow-ups. Our playbook on answering "tell me about yourself" covers the opening that precedes all of this.

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