Amazon Leadership Principles interviews: practice your stories out loud
At Amazon, the Leadership Principles run through the whole loop. Almost every interviewer in your loop will ask LP questions, and the Bar Raiser can spend most of an hour on them. You can write perfect STAR stories on paper and still lose the round when an interviewer asks a second follow-up you didn't plan for. A mock interview with someone who has sat on Amazon loops is the quickest way to find out which stories hold up.
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How Amazon tests the Leadership Principles
Amazon has 16 Leadership Principles. Each interviewer in your loop is usually assigned two or three of them, and they'll ask one or two questions per principle. Expect follow-ups like "What did you do specifically?", "What would you change?" and "How did you measure it?"
The Bar Raiser is an interviewer from outside the hiring team. Their job is to make sure every hire raises the average, and they can veto an offer. Candidates often say the Bar Raiser spent around 40 minutes on LPs and only 20 on coding.
The principles the interviewers care about shift with level. For SDE1, it's mostly Ownership, Learn and Be Curious, Dive Deep and Deliver Results. From SDE2 up, Have Backbone, Earn Trust and Think Big show up more often. For SDE3 and managers, Hire and Develop the Best and the two newest principles, added in 2021, become important too.
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All 16 Amazon Leadership Principles with sample questions
These are practice questions in the style candidates report, not leaked questions. The last column is what interviewers listen for.
[[table]]
Principle | Sample question | Good story shows
Customer Obsession | A time you put the customer first? | Customer data, not opinion
Ownership | Fixed something outside your job? | You acted unasked
Invent and Simplify | Simplified a complex process? | Fewer steps, measured
Are Right, A Lot | A call made with little data? | Sound judgment, checked later
Learn and Be Curious | Learned something new fast? | Self-driven learning
Hire and Develop the Best | Helped someone grow? | Their growth, named
Insist on the Highest Standards | Refused to ship something? | Raised the bar
Think Big | Proposed a bold idea? | Long-term vision
Bias for Action | Decided without full info? | Speed with managed risk
Frugality | Did more with less? | Real savings
Earn Trust | Admitted a mistake? | Candour, repair
Dive Deep | Found a hidden root cause? | Data, detail
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit | Disagreed with your manager? | Pushback, then full commit
Deliver Results | Hit a hard deadline? | Numbers, outcome
Strive to be Earth's Best Employer | Improved your team's work life? | Care for people
Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility | Weighed wider impact? | Second-order effects
[[/table]]
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What interviewers dig for on the tricky ones
Are Right, A Lot. This one trips people up because nobody is right all the time. A good story shows how you gathered different views, made a call, and then checked whether it worked. Admitting you were wrong once and what you changed afterwards is fine.
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. Interviewers want both halves. You pushed back with data, and when the decision went the other way, you committed fully and helped it succeed. Stories that end with "and I was proven right" can come across badly.
Dive Deep. Expect three or four follow-ups. Know the metrics, the logs you checked and the exact cause. If your story stays high level, the interviewer will assume you weren't close to the work.
Strive to be Earth's Best Employer. This and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility were added in 2021. Senior engineers and managers get these more often. Good stories involve making work safer, fairer or more sustainable for the people around you, or thinking about how a launch affects users and communities beyond the immediate goal.
Hire and Develop the Best. For managers, this is about hiring decisions and coaching. For senior ICs, mentoring, running interviews and raising the bar in code reviews all count.
How to build your LP stories
Use the STAR format: situation, task, action, result. Keep the situation and task short, around 20 percent of your answer. Spend most of the time on what you did and what came of it, with a number wherever you can.
You don't need 16 separate stories. Eight to ten strong ones, each mapped to two or three principles, will cover a full loop. Write them down, then say them out loud until each fits into about two minutes.
Your stories should match the level you're applying for.
[[table]]
Level | Story scope | Example
SDE1 | Your own task | Fixed a flaky test suite
SDE2 | A feature or service | Led a migration
SDE3 | Several teams | Set a design standard
Manager | Org and people | Rebuilt a team's hiring
[[/table]]
Experienced candidates get downlevelled most often because their stories are too small. If you're interviewing for SDE3 and every story is about your own code, the interviewer can't write up senior-level evidence. Pick stories where you influenced decisions beyond your team.
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Common mistakes
The biggest one is saying "we" the whole way through. Interviewers need to know what you did, so say "I" when it was you.
The second is skipping the result. If you can't share an exact number, give a direction and size, like "cut page load time by about a third."
The third is reusing one story for every question. Interviewers compare notes in the debrief, and hearing the same project four times weakens your case.
The last is choosing stories with no conflict or difficulty. Amazon wants to see how you behave when something goes wrong.
Where LPs fit in the full loop
LPs are only part of the interview. For the round-by-round breakdown at SDE1, SDE2 and SDE3, read our Amazon interview experience India guide. To practise coding and LP questions together in a timed format, see Amazon mock interview questions.
FAQs
How many Amazon Leadership Principles are there? There are 16. Strive to be Earth's Best Employer and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility were added in 2021.
Which Leadership Principles are asked most? Customer Obsession, Ownership, Dive Deep, Deliver Results and Have Backbone come up most in candidate reports.
How many LP stories should I prepare? Eight to ten strong stories, each covering two or three principles.
Does every Amazon interviewer ask LP questions? Almost always. Coding and design rounds usually open or close with 10 to 20 minutes of LP questions.
What does the Bar Raiser look for? Whether you'd raise the average of the team you're joining. They focus on LPs and can veto an offer.
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Get Your Stories Bar Raiser-Ready: Take a Mock Interview
A strong LP story has to survive the third follow-up. Practise with an interviewer who knows how Amazon scores these rounds, get honest feedback on each story, and walk into your loop with stories that match your level.
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