How to Answer Every Amazon Leadership Principles Question

Amazon does not have a separate "behavioral round" you can coast through. The 16 Leadership Principles are the scoring rubric for the entire loop, including your coding and system design interviews. There is no behavioral round. At Amazon, the Leadership Principles are tested in every interview you take, including the coding and system design rounds, by interviewers who were each handed specific principles to probe before you joined the call. To answer LP questions well, you need a bank of specific, first-person stories mapped to those principles, delivered in STAR format, and hardened against follow-up probes. Here is exactly how to do that.

How Amazon actually scores you

Each interviewer in your loop owns a slice of the principles and probes only those. Each interviewer in your loop is assigned 2 to 3 specific Leadership Principles to evaluate. They will ask behavioral questions designed to elicit stories from your past experience that demonstrate (or fail to demonstrate) those principles. The interviewer then writes up their assessment, scoring you against each assigned LP. After the loop, everyone meets to compare notes. After all interviews are complete, the full loop meets for a debrief. Every interviewer shares their LP-based assessment. Disagreements are discussed. And then the Bar Raiser weighs in.

Across a full loop, Amazon has 16 Leadership Principles (LPs). You'll be evaluated on 4 to 6 of them across the loop. The bar scales with level. Amazon's behavioral interview structure is the same across levels, but the bar for what constitutes a strong answer rises significantly at L6 and above. Senior candidates are expected to demonstrate broader scope of impact, more complex stakeholder management, and clearer examples of company-wide thinking. If you are targeting a senior title, read our take on how senior engineer interviews change expectations and calibrate your stories to company-wide scope, not just team-level wins.

The 16 principles, and the ones that actually come up

Here is the current list. 1. Customer Obsession, 2. Ownership, 3. Invent and Simplify, 4. Are Right, A Lot, 5. Learn and Be Curious, 6. Hire and Develop the Best, 7. Insist on the Highest Standards, 8. Think Big, 9. Bias for Action, 10. Frugality, 11. Earn Trust, 12. Dive Deep, 13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit, 14. Deliver Results, 15. Strive to be Earth's Best Employer, 16. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. There are currently 16 Amazon Leadership Principles. Amazon originally launched with 14 principles.

You do not need 16 flawless stories for every principle. A handful drive most of the scoring. In practice, interviewers most often probe Customer Obsession, Ownership, Dive Deep, Bias for Action, Earn Trust, and Deliver Results in fresher loops, based on candidate reports. Another practitioner list overlaps heavily: Customer Obsession, Ownership, Dive Deep, Deliver Results, and Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit are among the most frequently tested. Our advice from running mock loops all day: over-prepare Customer Obsession, Ownership, Dive Deep, and Deliver Results, then have solid backups for the rest.

Build a story bank, not 16 scripts

The mistake we see most often is candidates memorizing one canned answer per principle. That breaks the moment an interviewer reframes the question. Build a smaller set of rich stories, each tagged to multiple principles.

Preper's AI Story Builder helps you craft and refine STAR stories mapped to Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles, then tag each one to the two or three principles it covers, so you build the 12 to 15 story bank a full loop demands. That is the right target: roughly 12 to 15 distinct stories, each usable for two or three principles. One strong project can cover Ownership, Dive Deep, and Deliver Results at once if you emphasize different beats.

Pick stories with real conflict, a decision only you could make, and a measurable outcome. Vague team-success stories die in the debrief. As one guide puts it bluntly, Bar Raisers look for authentic, honest candidates who know their impact. Focus on accountability, courage, and data-driven results, not just "team wins."

The STAR structure Amazon expects

Every LP answer should follow Situation, Task, Action, Result. The STAR method is a way to answer behavioral questions by structuring your response into four parts: Situation (context), Task (your goal), Action (what you did), and Result (outcome). This ensures your answers are clear and focused on your contribution. Using STAR helps you hit on what Amazon interviewers want: concrete examples that demonstrate the principle in action.

The weighting matters. Keep the setup short and spend most of your airtime on what you personally did.

Part	Target length	What to say
Situation	2 to 3 sentences	Team, project, timeline, stakes
Task	1 to 2 sentences	Your individual mandate, not the team goal
Action	60 to 70% of the answer	Specific decisions you made and why, using "I"
Result	2 to 3 sentences	Quantified outcome plus what you learned

This mirrors how Amazon trains interviewers to listen. This is the longest part (60 to 70% of your answer). Detail exactly what you did step by step. Use "I" not "we." Describe the specific decisions you made and why. On the Task step specifically, What was YOUR specific responsibility? Not the team's goal, your individual mandate. Amazon cares about what you personally owned and drove. If you want a deeper walkthrough with examples, we cover this in the STAR method for software engineers.

For Result, quantify. Numbers separate a memorable answer from a forgettable one: Quantify outcomes ("increased customer NPS by 35%"), spotlight unexpected learnings, and connect to Amazon's principles.

Survive the Bar Raiser and the follow-ups

The Bar Raiser is the interviewer who can sink your offer. The Bar Raiser is an Amazon employee from a completely different team who joins your loop as an independent evaluator. They are not bound by role: The Bar Raiser can ask about any principle regardless of role. And they carry real weight. Every interviewer is assigned two to three LPs to probe, and an independent Bar Raiser asks LP questions with veto power over the offer.

The reason the round is hard is the depth of probing, not the opening question. Expect the interview to keep drilling: The Bar Raiser round is 60 minutes. Expect 3 to 4 behavioral questions, each with 5 to 8 follow-up probes. Every major answer you give will be challenged at least once. Prepare for the second and third layer of every story: Anticipate follow-up questions. Bar Raisers often dig deeper, so be ready to discuss alternatives, failures, and what you'd do next time. The mindset behind the round is asymmetric on purpose. Amazon would rather miss a good hire than make a bad one. The Bar Raiser exists to enforce this asymmetry.

Practically, that means for every core story you should be able to answer: What alternatives did you consider? What went wrong? What would you do differently? Who disagreed with you and how did you handle it? Our guide on handling follow-up questions applies directly here.

Do not neglect the coding rounds

Because LPs are graded everywhere, your technical rounds still need clean, well-explained solutions. The Amazon SDE loop leans on a recognizable set of problems. From the DevInterview question bank, the most frequently asked include "Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters," "Longest Palindromic Substring," "Add Two Numbers," "String to Integer (atoi)," and the staff-level "Median of Two Sorted Arrays." Many are string and array problems, so drilling string interview questions and running mock reps on the Amazon company track covers most of the surface area. Talk through your approach out loud as you code, because Ownership and Dive Deep get scored while you solve. For the end-to-end pipeline, see our breakdown of the Amazon SDE interview process from phone screen to offer.

FAQ

How many Leadership Principles will I be asked about?

Across the whole loop, expect to be scored on four to six of the sixteen, since each interviewer owns two or three and probes only those. The Bar Raiser can ask about any of them regardless of your role, so prepare stories for the high-frequency principles first: Customer Obsession, Ownership, Dive Deep, and Deliver Results.

How many stories should I prepare?

Aim for 12 to 15 distinct stories, each tagged to two or three principles, rather than one script per principle. Rich, reusable stories survive reframed questions and deep follow-ups. Choose ones with genuine conflict, a decision you personally owned, and a quantified result.

Should I say "I" or "we" in my answers?

Use "I." Amazon evaluates what you personally did, so describe your specific decisions and actions, even when the work was collaborative. Reserve "we" for genuinely shared context in the Situation step, then switch to first person for the Action.

Does the behavioral interview matter for engineering roles?

Yes, heavily. Amazon weighs behavioral signal more than most large tech companies, and the principles are tested in coding and system design rounds too. A strong technical performance with weak LP signal can still fail the debrief.

What makes the Bar Raiser round hard?

Depth, not the opening question. In roughly 60 minutes you face three to four questions with five to eight follow-up probes each, and every major claim gets challenged. Prepare the alternatives you rejected, what failed, and what you learned for each core story.