Company interview guide
Amazon interview guide
Amazon interviews are unique in their heavy emphasis on behavioral questions based on their 16 Leadership Principles. Expect roughly 50% of your interview to be behavioral, with the rest split between coding and system design.
Use this guide as an execution checklist: align your prep to each round, rehearse examples for behavioral depth, and run timed technical sessions to validate speed and clarity. Most candidates improve faster when they combine targeted study with regular simulation rather than solving questions at random.
Interview process
4 rounds- 011-2 hours
Online Assessment
Coding challenges on HackerRank or their internal platform. Usually 2 medium-difficulty problems.
- 0245-60 min
Phone Screen
One coding question + Leadership Principles behavioral questions. Conducted by a single interviewer.
- 034-5 hours
Onsite Loop
4-5 back-to-back interviews. Each interviewer focuses on 2-3 Leadership Principles + technical questions.
- 04Part of onsite
Bar Raiser
One interviewer is a "Bar Raiser" from another team who has veto power. Ensures hiring bar stays high.
Question breakdown
share of loopBehavioral (LP)
50%Leadership Principles stories using STAR method
Coding
30%Medium-hard LeetCode style, often arrays/strings
System Design
20%Design scalable systems (L5+)
Leadership principles
16 listedAmazon evaluates every candidate against these 16 principles. Prepare STAR stories for each.
- 01Customer Obsession
- 02Ownership
- 03Invent and Simplify
- 04Are Right, A Lot
- 05Learn and Be Curious
- 06Hire and Develop the Best
- 07Insist on the Highest Standards
- 08Think Big
- 09Bias for Action
- 10Frugality
- 11Earn Trust
- 12Dive Deep
- 13Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
- 14Deliver Results
- 15Strive to be Earth's Best Employer
- 16Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
Do
5- Prepare 8-10 detailed STAR stories that map to multiple Leadership Principles
- Every story needs quantifiable results (reduced latency by 40%, increased sales by $2M)
- Practice explaining your thought process out loud while coding
- For system design, always start with requirements clarification
- Be prepared to discuss failures - they love "Earn Trust" and learning from mistakes
Avoid
4- Generic answers without specific data or metrics
- Not connecting your stories back to Leadership Principles
- Jumping into coding without clarifying requirements
- Ignoring the behavioral portion to focus only on technical prep
Key patterns to master
These coding patterns appear frequently in Amazon interviews.
Complete your prep stack
Pair this guide with topic practice and timed simulation so you can move from knowledge to interview execution.
Keep a short weekly retrospective with three notes: what improved, what stalled, and what you will change next week. That feedback loop makes company-specific prep more consistent and reduces last-minute cramming.