Amazon Leadership Principles: Essential Guide for Interview Success

Amazon is one of the world's biggest tech giants, serving billions of customers worldwide. To serve their large customer base, they build many large-scale services that are critical to their business. Consequently, they need high-caliber engineers who are proficient not only in technical skills but also in leadership skills. During an interview, there are multiple parameters on which a candidate is assessed, and one of the most crucial ones is Amazon's Leadership Principles.

If you are eyeing a job at Amazon or preparing for an interview, you have arrived at the right place. In this blog, we will dive deep into all 16 leadership principles that Amazon lives by and guide you on showcasing them during the interview. You can use STAR methodology to effectively frame your answers to the leadership principle questions.

Amazon’s Leadership Principles

1. Customer Obsession

Whether rolling out a new feature or developing a new product, Amazon does everything, keeping the customer in mind. They start with customers’ needs and then work backward. They also monitor what the competitors are doing and work towards improving their customer experience.

Customer-centric: Tell me about a time when you worked on a project. How did you decide what to build and which features to support? What was the customer feedback, and how did you collect it? What changes did you make to the product based on the customer’s feedback?

2. Ownership

As an engineer at Amazon, you are expected to own your team’s deliverables end-to-end. Whether developing a module in service as a developer or ensuring that your team delivers on the entire project as a manager. This includes understanding how your systems and services work end-to-end and handling any issues you may encounter. Developers are expected to own the entire lifecycle of their work, from development to testing and production deployment.

Be an owner: Describe when you were tasked to work on a feature. How long did it take to be delivered into production? What issues or challenges did you face during its development?