Amazon leadership principles interview questions, with examples

Prepare decisions you can explain.

Choose real experiences where you made a decision, took responsibility, or learned from a setback. Practice explaining what you did and why, then answer follow-up questions about the details. Memorizing a question list gives you much less to work with when someone asks how you knew your decision was right.

Amazon publishes 16 Leadership Principles. Its SDE II preparation guide says interviewers ask behavioral questions about past successes and challenges, recommend STAR, and want data where it applies. That is a useful starting point; your recruiter’s instructions remain the guide to your particular role and interview schedule.

For the wider process and role-specific rounds, see our Amazon interview guide. This article focuses on choosing and telling your behavioral examples.

Practice questions for all 16 Amazon Leadership Principles

The names below follow Amazon’s published list. The questions, answer guidance, and follow-ups are our own practice exercises, not a list of questions Amazon guarantees it will ask.

1. Customer Obsession

Name the customer’s problem, the alternative your team preferred, and the cost of your decision. Explain how you checked whether it helped.

Try this follow-up: How did you know what the customer needed?

2. Ownership

Explain why the problem needed an owner, what you personally did, and how you left it with a clear owner afterward.

Try this follow-up: What happened after you stopped working on it?

3. Invent and Simplify

Describe what you removed, who had to use the solution, and the limits you accepted. Compare the work before and after.

Try this follow-up: What did you deliberately leave out?

4. Are Right, A Lot

Explain your original assumption, the information that challenged it, and how you changed course. Include someone whose perspective you sought.

Try this follow-up: What would have changed your mind sooner?

5. Learn and Be Curious

Choose a specific gap in your knowledge. Explain how you learned, tried the new approach, and checked your understanding.

Try this follow-up: What did your first attempt get wrong?

6. Hire and Develop the Best

Describe the help they needed, the feedback or practice you offered, and what they later did independently. You can use a peer example.

Try this follow-up: How did you know your help was useful to them?

7. Insist on the Highest Standards

Name the defect and its consequence. Explain the check that caught it, the delay you accepted, and how you prevented it from recurring.

Try this follow-up: How did you decide the remaining problems were acceptable?

8. Think Big

Explain the wider opportunity and the first practical step. Separate what you proposed from what actually happened.

Try this follow-up: How did you test the idea before asking for more resources?

9. Bias for Action

Explain what you knew, what remained uncertain, and why waiting had a cost. Describe how you limited the risk or could undo the decision.

Try this follow-up: What would have made you stop or reverse it?

10. Frugality

Describe the constraint, the options you considered, and the ongoing cost of your choice. Include any work it created for other people.

Try this follow-up: When would the more expensive option have been worth it?

11. Earn Trust

Say what you got wrong, whom you told, and what you changed. Describe how the other person responded over time.

Try this follow-up: What would that person say you still needed to improve?

12. Dive Deep

Walk through the discrepancy, the checks you ran, and the cause you found. Explain how the finding changed a decision.

Try this follow-up: Which number did you not trust, and why?

13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

Make both positions understandable. Say how you raised the disagreement, who decided, and what you did once the decision was made.

Try this follow-up: What did you do to help the chosen approach succeed?

14. Deliver Results

Start with your commitment, then explain the setback, when you told people, and how you recovered. Be clear about what remained unfinished.

Try this follow-up: What did you change about how you planned the next project?

15. Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer

Choose a concrete problem such as an unfair on-call burden or an inaccessible process. Explain whose experience you listened to and what improved.

Try this follow-up: How did you check whether the change helped everyone affected?

16. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

Describe a downstream effect, who would bear the cost, and how you changed the plan. Explain any harm you could not fully remove.

Try this follow-up: What would happen if this decision were repeated at a much larger scale?

Two worked answers, and the follow-ups they need

Use STAR: Situation, Task, Action, and Result to keep an answer easy to follow. Give enough context to understand the problem, then spend most of the answer on your choices and actions. Finish with what happened and what you learned.

Both examples below are fictional illustrations. Use your own experiences and results when you practice; the numbers show how an answer can become specific, not targets you need to match.

Example 1: Dive Deep and Ownership

Question: Describe a problem you found by investigating data that others had overlooked.

The answer explains the mismatch, the candidate’s investigation, their own change, and the remaining reports. It also gives an interviewer several useful places to ask for detail:

• Why did you suspect the dashboard was missing something?
• Which part did the payments engineer do, and which part was yours?
• What caused the six reports that remained?
• How did you check that the change had not introduced duplicate orders?

Example 2: Deliver Results and Earn Trust

Question: Tell me about a commitment you missed.

That leaves the listener guessing about the commitment, the candidate’s responsibility, and the outcome. Here is a more useful version:

This version owns the mistake without pretending the recovery erased it. Follow up with “What did the delay cost those customers?” and “What would you have done if they could not wait?”

Build a story bank, then practice the follow-ups

You do not need to write sixteen scripts. Start with a small set of real experiences: a customer problem, a difficult decision, a disagreement, a setback, something you simplified, and someone you helped. Add examples where the list above exposes a gap.

1. Write four lines per experience. Note the situation, your responsibility, your actions, and the result. Keep the notes short enough to glance at.
2. Map the experiences to principles. A customer incident might support Ownership or Dive Deep, depending on which decision the question asks about. Keep the facts consistent.
3. Check your results. Use numbers you can explain. If you do not have a reliable metric, describe an observable outcome and the limits of what you know.
4. Say one answer aloud. As a practice target, try an opening answer of about two minutes. Leave room for questions rather than trying to include every detail.
5. Ask someone to push on the unclear part. Try “Why that option?”, “What did you personally do?”, and “What would you change?” Revise the part you could not explain, then answer a different question using the same experience.

If you have two weeks, spend the first few days choosing and checking your examples, then alternate practice with revision. Leave time for a longer rehearsal near the end. If you have one evening, choose a few experiences you know well and practice the follow-ups before adding more.

RoundHound’s ready-made Amazon plans bring the researched rounds and practice setup together. Choose the Amazon new grad software engineer plan or the Amazon backend engineer plan, then choose a behavioral round. Your first 60 practice minutes are free.

Mistakes to avoid when answering

• Hiding your part behind “we.” Give teammates credit, then explain your own decisions and contribution.
• Making every story a success. Prepare a mistake you can discuss honestly, including what you did after it.
• Adding numbers you cannot defend. Explain where a measurement came from. Say when a result is an estimate.
• Removing the disagreement. “We aligned” leaves out the useful part. Explain the two positions and how the decision was reached.
• Forcing a memorized answer onto a different question. Listen for the decision the interviewer is asking about, and choose an example that actually addresses it.

Common questions about Amazon behavioral interviews

How many leadership principles questions will I get?

That depends on the role and interview format. Amazon’s SDE II guide says each interviewer typically asks two or three behavioral questions. Treat that as guidance for that role, not a guaranteed count for every Amazon interview. Ask your recruiter what to expect.

Do I need a different story for every principle?

One experience can illustrate more than one principle. Prepare enough variety to answer the actual question without repeatedly falling back on an example that only partly fits. There is no required story count in the Amazon sources linked here.

What if I have no full-time work experience?

Practice with coursework, volunteering, part-time work, or a group project where you made a real decision. Explain the stakes without inflating them. Our internship interview guide shows how to draw on student experiences.

Will these exact questions come up?

These are practice prompts we wrote around the published principles. Preparing the underlying experiences helps you respond when the wording or follow-up changes. For more examples across roles, read our behavioral interview questions and answers.

Sources and what we checked

Amazon’s guidance checked on October 20, 2026. The practice questions, fictional answers, and preparation schedule are our recommendations. They do not describe Amazon’s internal scoring or guarantee a particular interview format.

• Amazon’s Leadership Principles — the current names and Amazon’s explanation of each principle.
• Amazon’s interview loop overview — how individual interviews contribute to the hiring process.
• Amazon’s SDE II interview preparation — behavioral questions, STAR, and using data where applicable. Its round counts and timing apply to SDE II.