Me.

Interviewing at Amazon — Leadership Principles — Now Including the 2 New Principles

Disclaimer: I’m not representing Amazon in any way with my posts, opinions written here are strictly my own.

To find the rest of this article, and more on this topic, please visit my website: https://www.scarletink.com/interviewing-at-amazon-leadership-principles/

This post is a part of a series. This post summarizes the Amazon leadership principle / behavioral interviews. I also have a post on the Amazon technical / functional interviews, and a post on the overall Amazon interview and hiring process.

Update: 7/1/2021 — Amazon announced today that they created two new Leadership Principles. This documents non-project related behaviors we expect from our leaders. I’ve updated this article to walk through these new principles.

Update: 6/8/2021 — I’ve continued to have weekly contacts from people who have said that this article has helped them get a position at Amazon. Recruiters from Amazon continue to send this article to new candidates, saying that it is clear which candidates have read the article, and which haven’t. I’ve repeatedly revisited this article to ensure that it’s up to date, and believe it’s an excellence resource.

As a bar raiser at Amazon (a little googling will answer what that is if you’re not aware), I’ve gotten the opportunity to interview a lot of people. I’ve interviewed both very senior and very junior folks. Bar raisers do interview across all job families, and I’ve interviewed people for some pretty crazy positions. However, most of my interviews are for technical positions. Jobs like technical program managers, software development managers, quality engineers/managers, and of course the highest volume: software development engineers.

There are plenty of web resources regarding how to pass the functional (job skills) part of interviews. In fact, when I have friends and relatives interviewing, I send them to the internet to figure out what types of questions to prepare for rather than spend my time explaining. This type of preparing is pretty straight forward. You need to be good at your job, and make certain that the functional knowledge about your job is pretty fresh in your head. Perhaps how Hashtables work, or a bit about K-means…