Amazon's interview process is unusually structured relative to most big tech companies, and that structure almost entirely revolves around one thing: the Leadership Principles. There are 16 of them (17 if you count 'Strive to be Earth's Best Employer', which was added more recently), and the behavioral bar is not a formality. Every interviewer is assigned specific LPs to probe, and they're looking for genuine S.T.A.R. narratives, not vague claims.
Typical loop for SWE roles: a phone screen or online assessment, then an on-site (now virtual) of 4-5 rounds. Each round usually covers 1-2 coding problems plus 1-2 LP behavioral questions. There's also typically a 'bar raiser': an interviewer from outside the hiring team whose sole job is to enforce the hiring bar company-wide. They often dig harder on behavioral than the team itself does.
For senior and staff roles, the system design round carries significant weight, and the behavioral bar scales up: they want evidence that you influence, not just execute. For PMs, there's usually a product sense round plus a metrics/estimation round plus LPs.
One thing candidates consistently underestimate: the written debrief format means vague answers don't survive note-taking. Specificity matters more here than almost anywhere else.
Read the full Primly report at /community/behavioral-interview-questions/amazon
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