I spent three years placing engineers into Amazon roles before moving to an agency and I've been through the candidate side too. The behavioral interview at Amazon is genuinely different from other companies and I think most candidates don't understand the mechanics until they've either aced it or bombed it.
The structure Every interview at Amazon, including the coding rounds, has Leadership Principle questions. There are 16 LPs total and they're not all equally weighted in interviews. The ones that come up constantly: Customer Obsession, Bias for Action, Dive Deep, Earn Trust, Deliver Results, and Ownership. Learn those six cold. The others come up but less predictably.
What they want in a STAR answer Amazon is more rigorous about STAR format than almost any company I've worked with. Vague answers fail fast. They want: A specific situation with enough context to understand what was at stake A clear description of YOUR action, not your team's action A result with a number or at least a concrete outcome
The follow-up questions are often "tell me more about what you personally did" or "what would you have done differently." That's the dive deep follow-up. Have an answer.
Common mistakes Using 'we' throughout without distinguishing your role. They will ask you to clarify and it's awkward. Describing a success without any friction or failure. They like hearing about things that didn't go perfectly and what you did about it. Having one story for every question. They'll ask five to seven LP questions across your loop. You need at least eight to ten distinct stories.
The bar raiser At least one of your interviewers is a bar raiser, someone designated to maintain hiring standards across teams. They often push harder on the behavioral component. If an interviewer seems to be probing the same story from multiple angles, that's probably them.
Prepare stories from different time horizons. A story from this year and one from three years ago both being strong is better than five stories all from the last six months.