🙋♂️ Hi there, I’m Austen, a former Senior Engineering Manager and Hiring Committee Chair at Meta and I’ve conducted over 1,000 interviews and coached 200+ candidates. Grab a copy of my best-selling book Mastering Behavioral Interviews to get a complete prep system and learn how to land the roles that really matter.
Recently, I sat down with Gilad Naor of Management Deltas to discuss what makes Amazon’s approach to behavioral interviews so uniquely challenging and how to master them.
If you’re preparing for an Amazon interview, you probably already know they’re different. But different how? That’s what we dug into.
Gilad is an expert on Amazon’s hiring process (he’s was an EM at Amazon and Meta), and he’s worked with hundreds of candidates preparing for their loops. His mentoring program, Management Deltas, helps engineers ace their interviews and accelerate their careers.
Here’s what stood out to me from our conversation, and what you need to know if you’re going to nail your Amazon interviews.
P.S. We took a risk and filmed this outside, on Stanford’s campus. It was beautiful, but the audio wasn’t the best :( To compensate for that, the universe sent us some coyotes, which apparently live at Stanford.
Leadership Principles Aren’t Just for Interviews, They’re the Operating System
Most companies have values, but Amazon has Leadership Principles, and they treat them differently.
At most tech companies, the stated values live on a wall somewhere. Maybe they get mentioned at an all-hands. But in the day-to-day, people aren’t actively using them to make decisions. That was certainly the case at Meta.
But not at Amazon.
Gilad explained that Amazon’s 16 Leadership Principles are the operating system for the entire company—at every level. When the CEO or any executive can’t be in the room for a decision, those principles codify the best practices the company has learned about how to make hard decisions. Technical ones, strategic ones, people decisions.
Think of it like design patterns in code. They provide a consistent language. When someone says “customer obsession” in a meeting, everyone knows what that means and why it matters.
And critically, in every behavioral interview you’ll do at Amazon, you’ll be assessed on a specific subset of these 16 principles. Each interviewer has 2-3 principles they’re evaluating. This means the leadership principles aren’t optional context for your Amazon interview.
In case the LPs are new to you, here are all 16:
Customer Obsession: Starting with the customer and working backwards.
Ownership: Thinking long-term and acting on behalf of the entire company.
Invent and Simplify: Expecting and requiring innovation and simplification.
Are Right, A Lot: Possessing strong judgment and good instincts.
Learn and Be Curious: Constantly exploring new possibilities and improving.
Hire and Develop the Best: Raising the performance bar with every hire.
Insist on the Highest Standards: Relentlessly high standards for products and services.
Think Big: Creating and communicating a bold direction.
Bias for Action: Valuing speed and calculated risk-taking in business.
Frugality: Accomplishing more with less.
Earn Trust: Listening, speaking candidly, and treating others with respect.
Dive Deep: Operating at all levels, staying connected to details.
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit: Challenging decisions respectfully, then committing wholly.
Deliver Results: Focusing on key inputs and delivering quality outcomes in time.
Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer: Creating a safer, more productive, higher-performing, and diverse work environment.
Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility: Being humble, considering the secondary effects of actions, and leaving things better.
Your Stories Need to Reveal Your Decision-Making Process
When Gilad asks candidates about a time they refactored some code, they’ll jump into: “I refactored this service, it took two weeks, we reduced load by 30%.” But that’s a pretty incomplete picture of your project.
What Amazon really wants to see is: How do you think? How do you navigate the tension between moving fast and maintaining quality? Between thinking big and keeping things simple? How do you make hard decisions when there’s no obvious right answer?
So instead of just telling the story, Gilad recommends this approach:
Prepare your stories in advance. Build a story bank (you should be doing this anyway, see my book). Then, for each story, identify which leadership principles you demonstrated. More importantly, identify the tensions in that story—moments where two principles were in conflict.
For example, you had to move fast (Bias for Action), but you also wanted to maintain quality (Insist on the Highest Standards). What did you choose? How did you think about the risk? Why did you make that call?
Don’t name-drop the leadership principle. Instead, talk about the behaviors and the thinking process. “I thought about the blast radius if we made a mistake” and “I invested time in building a test harness before we refactored” tells the interviewer way more than “I demonstrated Insist on the Highest Standards.”
Think out loud the way you would in a coding interview.
The Bar Raiser Is Central to the Entire Process
Amazon has a role that other companies don’t have: the Bar Raiser.
Every Amazon interview loop includes a Bar Raiser, who is always from a different organization (not your team). Their job is to ensure that the process works for Amazon, not just for your hiring manager. They run the debrief and one of the only two people who have a vote. The other person is the hiring manager.
Gilad told me about loops where it looked like a “no hire” at the start of the debrief, but by the end, they’d decided to hire. How?
The Bar Raiser would synthesize information across all the interviews. Maybe one interviewer felt you were strong on one leadership principle and weak on another, but two other interviewers showed you were actually strong on both. The Bar Raiser connects the dots.
Or they play devil’s advocate, pushing the team to really justify their reasoning. Sometimes that clarification changes minds.
This is why every single interview matters from a behavioral perspective at Amazon, not just the ones with the hiring manager. And it’s why behavioral signal is so important—it’s one of the main things that can shift opinions in that debrief.
Data-Driven AND Good Judgment
One theme that kept coming up: Amazon is obsessed with data, but not like other companies. At junior levels, being data-driven is about gathering information before making decisions, but as you get more senior, it’s about your judgment in the absence of data.
Jeff Bezos writes about this in his shareholder letters. Some decisions can be solved with math if you have all the data. But you usually don’t have all the data. That’s where your judgment comes in.
So when you’re telling stories at Amazon, especially if you’re interviewing for a senior level:
Talk about the metrics you tracked
Be specific with numbers
But also talk about decisions where you had to use judgment
Explain why you chose to trust your judgment in a particular situation
And avoid “weasel words” like “really significant” or “moved really fast.” Amazon wants specifics. It’s both a reflection of how they communicate and what they value.
The Questions You Should Ask Your Recruiter
Before your loop, you should have a phone call with your recruiter (not email), since recruiters will be more candid on the phone and share things off the record they won’t put in writing.
What should you ask?
Which leadership principles are you being evaluated on?
Amazon has 16 principles. The hiring manager will typically focus on a subset that matters most for your level and role. Getting hints on which ones can help you prepare.
What does success look like at your level?
What’s the team/organization like?
Are there any specific areas the team is concerned about for this role?
This information is gold because you can then make sure your stories align with what they’re actually looking for.
Top Tips for Amazon Interview Success
1. Preparation is Non-Negotiable
Especially at junior levels, don’t discount the importance of behavioral interviews. You’d be surprised how many junior candidates think the behavior interview doesn’t matter as much as the coding interview. It does. Amazon weights behavioral heavily, even for junior roles.
Build a story catalog based on hard situations you’ve navigated, not based on the questions you think you’ll get asked. Then, map those stories to leadership principles.
2. Study the Leadership Principles Deeply
Don’t just read the names. Amazon publishes a full description for each principle on their careers page. There’s also a videos of executives describing each one. Watch them.
3. Think About Tensions
Some of Amazon’s leadership principles have inherent tension. Bias for Action vs. Insist on the Highest Standards. Think Big vs. Frugality. Leaders who can navigate these tensions are the ones who succeed at Amazon.
When you’re prepping, ask yourself: In my story, where was the tension? How did I think about it? What were the tradeoffs?
4. Understand Amazon’s Writing Culture
Amazon has a strong writing culture (they use written narratives for decision-making). The way you write about your accomplishments as part of the interview process reflects how you’d communicate at Amazon.
Avoid vague language
Use specific numbers and percentages
Be clear and concise
Show your thinking, not just your results
5. Be Prepared for Variance
Amazon is distributed (see their culture of two-pizza teams, microservices, etc.), and that distributed structure applies to interviews too. There’s a lot of variance in how different interviewers run their interviews. But there are guardrails (the Bar Raiser system, standardized training). Don’t stress if one interview feels different from another—that’s normal.
Watch the Full Interview
To hear the full conversation with Gilad—including deep dives on the bar raiser process, how to prepare for level-specific expectations, and tactical tips for every stage of your Amazon interview—check out the full video.
And if you’re serious about Amazon prep, I’d also recommend checking out Management Deltas. Gilad specializes in Amazon and Meta interviews, and he works directly with candidates through his mentoring program.
Good luck with your Amazon interviews. You’ve got this.
*Questions about Amazon behavioral interviews? Drop them in the comments!