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Amazon Leadership Principles: Interview Guide and Questions

Amazon's leadership principles are sixteen short statements of how the company expects people to think, decide and behave. They date back to the early 2000s, when Amazon wrote down the behaviors it wanted to keep as it grew, and the list stayed at fourteen for most of its life. Two were added in 2021: Strive to be Earth's Best Employer and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility.

For a candidate they are not background reading. Every Amazon interview, from phone screen to final loop, is graded against them. Each interviewer owns two or three principles, asks behavioral questions designed to surface evidence for them, and writes that evidence up before the hiring decision. Walk in without a story for a principle and the interviewer will notice the gap.

This guide covers all sixteen principles in Amazon's order, each with a plain-language explanation, three sample questions and a link to its dedicated guide, then how the loop uses them, which ones matter most for your role, and a two-week plan.

The 16 Amazon leadership principles (official list)

The wording below quotes one sentence from each principle as published on the Amazon leadership principles page. Read the full text there once; the explanations here are about what interviewers do with them.

Customer Obsession

Leaders start with the customer and work backwards.

The principle Amazon talks about most. Decisions begin with what the customer needs, not with what the team wants to build or what a competitor just shipped. Bezos has framed it as a choice between companies that work to charge more and companies that work to charge less, with Amazon in the second group.

  • Tell me about a time you pushed back on a request because it was not right for the customer.
  • Describe a change you made after listening to customer feedback. What was the result?
  • How do you find out what a customer actually needs when they cannot tell you?

Full guide: Customer Obsession interview questions and answers.

Ownership

They think long term and don't sacrifice long-term value for short-term results.

Ownership opens with the line that leaders are owners: they act for the whole company rather than their own team, and never say that something is not their job. In interviews it shows up as stories where you took on a problem nobody assigned to you and stayed with it to the end.

  • Tell me about a time you took on something outside your job description. Why?
  • Describe a decision where you traded a short-term win for a better long-term outcome.
  • Tell me about a problem you noticed, nobody owned, and you fixed anyway.

Full guide: Ownership interview questions and answers.

Invent and Simplify

Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify.

Two things that often pull against each other: inventing something new and making the existing thing simpler. Amazon also expects people to look outside for ideas rather than rejecting anything "not invented here". Good stories remove steps, retire systems, or replace a manual process with a smaller automated one.

  • Tell me about the most innovative thing you have done. What problem did it solve?
  • Describe a process you simplified. What did you remove and what happened?
  • Tell me about an idea you borrowed from outside your team or company.

Full guide: Invent and Simplify interview questions and answers.

Are Right, A Lot

They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.

The most misread principle on the list. It is not about never being wrong. It is about judgment: making good calls with incomplete information, looking for evidence that you are mistaken, and changing your mind when the data says so. Interviewers grade how you decided, not only whether it worked out.

  • Tell me about a decision you made with incomplete information. How did you decide?
  • Describe a time you were wrong. How did you find out, and what did you do next?
  • Tell me about a time someone changed your mind.

Full guide: Are Right, A Lot interview questions and answers.

Learn and Be Curious

Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves.

The habit of learning, not a list of courses. Interviewers want a specific example: something you did not know, how you learned it, and what you did with it afterwards. A self-taught skill that changed how your team works beats a certificate.

  • Tell me about something you taught yourself recently. Why that, and how?
  • Describe a time curiosity led you to a problem or an opportunity nobody had seen.
  • How do you keep up with your field? Give me a concrete example from the last few months.

Full guide: Learn and Be Curious interview questions and answers.

Hire and Develop the Best

Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion.

For managers this is tested directly: how you hire, how you coach, how you handle someone who is not performing. For individual contributors it shows up as mentoring, interviewing and the feedback you give peers. The Bar Raiser program is this principle turned into a process.

  • Tell me about the best hire you ever made. What did you see that others missed?
  • Describe how you helped someone on your team grow into a bigger role.
  • Tell me about a time you gave difficult feedback. How did you deliver it?

Full guide: Hire and Develop the Best interview questions and answers.

Insist on the Highest Standards

Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.

The principle admits that outsiders may find the standards unreasonably high. In practice: refusing to ship what you know is not good enough, fixing root causes rather than symptoms, and raising the bar even when the deadline argues against it.

  • Tell me about a time you refused to ship something that was not good enough.
  • Describe a time you raised the quality bar on your team. How did people react?
  • Tell me about a defect that reached customers. What did you change so it could not happen again?

Full guide: Insist on the Highest Standards interview questions and answers.

Think Big

Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The size of the direction you set, not the size of your current project. Interviewers want to see that you proposed something larger than what was asked, backed it with a plan, and brought people along. A bold idea without follow-through is not a Think Big story.

  • Tell me about a time you proposed something much bigger than what was asked of you.
  • Describe a vision you set for a team or product. How did you get people behind it?
  • Tell me about a bold idea that did not work. What did you learn?

Full guide: Think Big interview questions and answers.

Bias for Action

Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study.

Speed matters in business, and most decisions can be undone. The skill tested is telling reversible decisions from irreversible ones and moving fast on the first kind. Acting quickly on an irreversible decision reads as recklessness, not bias for action.

  • Tell me about a time you made a decision quickly with limited information. What happened?
  • Describe a time you acted without waiting for approval. Why was that the right call?
  • Tell me about a calculated risk you took. How did you calculate it?

Full guide: Bias for Action interview questions and answers.

Frugality

Accomplish more with less.

Not about being cheap. Frugality treats constraints as a source of invention and refuses to measure progress by headcount or budget. The best stories show you solving a problem with what you already had, or cutting a cost without cutting the outcome.

  • Tell me about a time you delivered a result with far fewer resources than you wanted.
  • Describe a cost you cut. How did you know the outcome would not suffer?
  • Tell me about a time a constraint forced a better solution.

Full guide: Frugality interview questions and answers.

Earn Trust

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully.

Candor in both directions: saying hard things respectfully, and being openly self-critical even when it is awkward. Interviewers listen for whether you admit mistakes unprompted and give credit to others by name.

  • Tell me about a time you had to rebuild trust with a colleague or a customer.
  • Describe a time you admitted a mistake publicly. What happened?
  • Tell me about a time you had to deliver bad news to a stakeholder.

Full guide: Earn Trust interview questions and answers.

Dive Deep

Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ.

Dive Deep means you know your numbers and you check them. When the dashboard says one thing and a customer says another, a leader goes and finds out which is right. Bezos was known for forwarding a customer complaint to a team with nothing but a question mark, which is this principle in one character.

  • Tell me about a time the data and the story did not match. What did you do?
  • Describe the most complex problem you had to understand in detail before you could solve it.
  • Tell me about a metric you dug into and found was misleading.

Full guide: Dive Deep interview questions and answers.

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting.

Two halves, both graded: whether you say what you think when it is unpopular, with facts behind it, and whether, once the decision goes the other way, you commit fully rather than quietly waiting to be proven right. Interviewers probe the second half hard.

  • Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager. How did you make your case?
  • Describe a decision you argued against, lost, and then had to deliver. How did you do it?
  • Tell me about a time you were the only person in the room with a different view.

Full guide: Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit interview questions and answers.

Deliver Results

Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion.

Where the interviewer expects numbers. Pick the inputs that matter and get them done despite setbacks. Stories should name the goal, the obstacle, what you personally did, and a measured outcome.

  • Tell me about a goal you hit despite a serious obstacle. What was the obstacle?
  • Describe a time you did not meet a commitment. What did you do when you saw it coming?
  • Tell me about the most significant result you have delivered in the last two years.

Full guide: Deliver Results interview questions and answers.

Strive to be Earth's Best Employer

Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment.

Added in 2021, this principle asks leaders whether the people around them are growing, empowered and ready for what comes next. For managers it is how you develop and protect your team; for everyone else it is how you treat peers, especially under pressure.

  • Tell me about a time you improved how your team worked, not just what it shipped.
  • Describe how you have supported a colleague's growth or wellbeing.
  • Tell me about a time you noticed someone on your team was struggling. What did you do?

Full guide: Strive to be Earth's Best Employer interview questions and answers.

Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions.

The other 2021 addition. Amazon started in a garage, the principle says, and is not there anymore; being big means owning the side effects of what you build on communities, the planet and future generations. In interviews it comes up as questions about second-order consequences of your decisions.

  • Tell me about a decision where you considered effects beyond your immediate goal.
  • Describe a time you found an unintended consequence of something you built. What did you do?
  • Tell me about a time you left something better than you found it.

Full guide: Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility interview questions and answers.

How Amazon uses the leadership principles in interviews

Knowing the list is the easy part. What matters is how the loop turns it into a decision.

Before the loop, the hiring manager and recruiter assign principles to interviewers. Each owns two or three and chooses behavioral questions to surface evidence for those. A coding round is still a coding round, but ten to fifteen minutes of it go to one or two principles, written up separately.

Interviewers expect answers in the shape of the STAR method: situation, the task you owned, the actions you personally took, the measured result. The word "I" matters. An answer told entirely as "we" is scored as missing evidence, not modesty.

Every loop includes a Bar Raiser, a trained interviewer from outside the hiring team whose job is to protect the hiring bar across the company. The Bar Raiser usually leads the debrief, and in practice a firm no from them stops the hire. They ask the hardest follow-ups: what you would do differently, what the trade-off was, what the number actually was.

After the loop, each interviewer writes feedback before reading anyone else's and records a vote. The debrief runs on evidence, not impressions. "Strong communicator" counts for little; "cut deployment time from four hours to twenty minutes by removing two manual gates" counts for a lot. Prepare your stories at that level of detail and you are preparing for the debrief, where the decision is made.

Which principles come up most by role

Any principle can be asked of anyone, so treat this as a map of where interviewers spend their time, not a list of what to skip.

Software engineers (SDE I to III, senior): Deliver Results, Ownership, Dive Deep, Insist on the Highest Standards, Bias for Action, Learn and Be Curious. Expect one story about a production problem and one about a trade-off under time pressure. The Amazon software engineer interview guide covers the full loop.

Engineering managers and senior leaders: Hire and Develop the Best, Earn Trust, Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit, Think Big, Strive to be Earth's Best Employer, Deliver Results. Managers are also asked for scope: how many people, what budget, which decisions were yours.

Product and program managers: Customer Obsession, Invent and Simplify, Are Right, A Lot, Think Big, Dive Deep, Deliver Results. Expect follow-ups on disagreements with engineering and on how you measured outcomes. See the program manager interview guide.

Data, analytics and science roles: Dive Deep, Are Right, A Lot, Insist on the Highest Standards, Customer Obsession. Have a story where you doubted a metric and went to the raw data.

Operations, sales and non-technical roles: Customer Obsession, Ownership, Deliver Results, Frugality, Earn Trust. Same questions; the examples come from a warehouse, an account or a support queue instead of a codebase.

Amazon's leadership principles and ethical climate

People searching for Amazon's ethical climate usually want one of two things: a business-school answer about how the principles shape the company's culture, or a candidate's answer about what it is like to work there. Here is both, briefly.

As a statement of ethical climate, the sixteen principles describe a culture built on a few explicit commitments. Customer trust comes first and is treated as earned, not assumed. Candor runs in both directions: Earn Trust asks leaders to be vocally self-critical, and Have Backbone asks them to challenge decisions they believe are wrong. Insist on the Highest Standards makes people responsible for defects they could have stopped. Are Right, A Lot asks them to seek evidence against their own view. In the language of organizational research this is a principle-driven climate: people are expected to reason from stated rules rather than from what is convenient or what the group prefers.

The two principles added in 2021 widened that frame. Strive to be Earth's Best Employer commits leaders to the safety, growth and fairness of the people who work for them; Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility commits the company to the side effects of its size on communities and the environment. Both followed years of public criticism of working conditions in Amazon's operations, and the company has described them as a response to its own scale rather than a change of direction. Whether they have changed day-to-day behavior is a fair question to put to the people interviewing you.

For a candidate the honest picture includes the tensions. The pace that Bias for Action and Deliver Results reward is real and sustained. Frugality means fewer people and fewer tools than you may be used to. Performance management is direct, and the candor the principles ask of leaders is applied to you in reviews and promotion decisions. Many people find that energizing and many find it exhausting, and the interview is a fair place to find out which you are. Ask your interviewers how a disagreement on their team was resolved last quarter, what happened the last time something shipped late, how the team handled its most recent production incident, and what they would change about the team. The answers say more about the ethical climate of a specific team than any statement of principles can, because principles describe the intended culture and teams live the actual one.

How to prepare in two weeks

You do not need sixteen separate stories. Eight to ten good ones, each told with different emphasis, cover the list.

Days one to three. Build a story bank: every project, incident, disagreement and decision from the last three to five years with a measurable outcome. Do not filter yet. Note the number for each: hours saved, revenue, error rate, time to ship.

Days four to six. Map stories to principles. Each usually serves two or three; a production incident you owned can be Ownership, Dive Deep or Insist on the Highest Standards depending on emphasis. Check for gaps. Have Backbone and Hire and Develop the Best are the ones most candidates find they have nothing for.

Days seven to ten. Write each story in STAR form with the result quantified, then cut the situation to three sentences. First drafts spend two minutes on context and thirty seconds on what you did; reverse that ratio.

Days eleven to fourteen. Practice out loud, under time, with someone asking the follow-ups: what did you personally do, what was the number, what would you do differently. A mock interview with someone who has run Amazon loops shows which stories collapse on the second question.

Two interview questions per principle

Thirty-two more questions for drilling, none repeated from above.

  • Customer Obsession: A time you went beyond what the customer expected. The last time you said no to a customer, and why.
  • Ownership: A time you stayed with a problem after it stopped being your responsibility. A time you took the blame for a team mistake.
  • Invent and Simplify: A problem you solved in an unusual way. The most complex thing you have made simple.
  • Are Right, A Lot: A time your instinct was right and the data looked wrong. A decision you would reverse today.
  • Learn and Be Curious: Something you learned outside your field and used at work. The last thing you got wrong because you did not know enough.
  • Hire and Develop the Best: A time you let someone go or moved them off a project. How you choose between two candidates who look equal.
  • Insist on the Highest Standards: Work others accepted that you did not. A standard you set that was too high.
  • Think Big: A time you convinced people to aim higher than they wanted. The biggest thing you have ever proposed.
  • Bias for Action: A time you waited too long. A decision you made in under a day that mattered.
  • Frugality: A time you had no budget and still delivered. Something you built instead of bought, and whether that was right.
  • Earn Trust: A time you lost someone's trust and got it back. Credit you gave that could have been yours.
  • Dive Deep: The real cause of a problem everyone else had misdiagnosed. A detail you caught that changed a decision.
  • Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit: A decision you committed to and still think was wrong. A time you changed a senior leader's mind.
  • Deliver Results: A deadline you thought was impossible and met. A goal you missed, and what you did next.
  • Strive to be Earth's Best Employer: A time you made your team a better place to work. A time you protected your team from an unreasonable ask.
  • Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility: A decision where the right thing for the company and for the customer differed. A time you thought about who else your work would affect.

Related Amazon interview guides

Get matched with a coach who has run Amazon loops, or start with the STAR method guide, the story bank guide and the Amazon software engineer interview guide.