3 Types of Amazon Interview Questions and how to ace them
“I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.” Jeff Bezos.
There are two big mistakes candidates make when preparing for Amazon job interviews. The first is attempting to memorise the questions they find online and the second is attempting to script ‘perfect’ answers. This is as far as most candidates get.
This is not a great approach for a few reasons
The range of Amazon interview questions is huge and you can’t anticipate every single one that will be thrown at you in the interview. Questions asked will be unique to the specific role, so focusing on a list of top 10 popular questions can be meaningless. Being on the lookout for the questions so you can determine which answer to provide is stressful and makes it impossible to be in the moment. Attempting to ‘give them what they want to hear’ can easily backfire and can make you appear insincere and dishonest. They’ll see through it. Worse, it makes you second guess yourself. And that is the absolute destroyer of confidence.
Amazon interview questions fall into three categories.
A far more effective approach is to develop a strong understanding of the Amazon Leadership Principles and to learn to view your own experience in the Amazonian way. We’ll show you how to do that here, and when you’re ready to step up, our premium resources provide in-depth information and analysis to help you on your way. The most important step is understanding the types of Amazon interview questions you can expect.
1. General questions
There are top line questions intended to clarify your motivations, test your understanding of the role, and get to know you. They are more important in the early round. In the final round they are still important, but remember the final round is really focused on the Leadership Principles questions and you won’t want to spend too much time on these general questions. If you’ve made it to the final round then your answer from the first round was sound. Stick to it and move quickly to the leadership principles questions.
Example questions:
Why do you want to work at Amazon?
What is it about this role that interests you?
Tell me about yourself.
Which Amazon leadership principle do you resonate with most?
Why Product Management? (Or HR, or Alexa…)
Do you feel you have a good understanding of what this role is about?
Describe what Human Resources means to you? (Or Marketing, or Finance…)
Why do you want to work on Amazon Alexa? (Or Prime, or Echo…)
Why do you want to join this team?
Why do you think you’re the right person for this role?
Your answers need to be tailored to Amazon, the team, the function and the product as much as possible. The key here is to be sincere and honest. If your answers could be used in an interview with Facebook or Google, they’re not specific enough. Our free guide to answering the “Why Amazon?” question shows a proven method to surface genuine motivations that will resonate with your interviewers. The method can be applied across this range of questions.
2. Amazon Leadership Principles Interview Questions
These questions will form the core of your interview process. The Amazon Leadership Principles interview questions are used to evaluate your fit with the Amazon culture. Each question will be targeted at exploring a particular Leadership Principle. They’ll be wanting you to demonstrate specific behavioural tendencies and character traits, so developing an understanding of the principles is important. Once you understand the principles, identifying what the questions is about becomes much easier.
Example Amazon Leadership Principles Behavioural Interview Questions:
Tell me about a time you handled a difficult customer.
Tell me about a time you weren’t able to meet a time commitment.
Tell me about a time where you had to leave a task unfinished.
What is the most difficult situation you have faced.
Give me an example of a time when you were 75% of the way through a project, and you had to pivot strategy--how were you able to make that into a success story?
Tell the story of the last time you had to apologise to someone.
If your direct manager was instructing you to do something you disagreed with, how would you handle it?
What’s the worst mistake you ever made?
What’s the most innovative thing you’ve done?
Tell me about a time you obsessed over giving a high quality service to a customer?
There are 14 Leadership Principles in total, and each one has a set of questions the interviewers will be choosing from. You can see how preparing for specific questions becomes a futile strategy - there’s just too many to prepare for!
To adequately prepare for the core behavioural questions, you’ll need to develop an intuitive understanding of the Amazon leadership principles. This knowledge will allow you to see your experience in the Amazon way and enable a relevant discussion of your experience. Once you understand the Amazon Leadership Principles, you’ll need to worry a lot less about expected questions. No matter the question, armed with this knowledge you’ll be able to flex to whatever is thrown at you. The more you understand the Amazon Leadership Principles, the more confident you will be.
And remember, our Premium Amazon Interview Prep resources focus on understanding the Amazon Leadership Principles. We deconstruct each principle to its fundamentals and provide real life examples of each one in action from Amazon’s own rich history. You can buy them here.
3. Specialised Questions
Your interview may include a specialised question component, especially at the Manager and Senior Manager level. These will focus on the most relevant areas of your experience for the role. Software development or data science roles will include technical questions on specific topical areas. Strategic roles may have case-like questions. There may be logical, ethical, or operational areas that are explored through specialised behavioural questions, depending on the role you’re seeking.
Example specialised questions (don’t expect all of these!):
Here is a string with numbers from 1-250 in random order. It's missing one number. How will you find the missed number?
What is the angle between the hour hand and minute hand in an analog clock?
Are you willing to work on your feet for ten hours, four days a week?
Would you tell on an employee for stealing $1?
What would you do if somehow you misdirected 10,000 units of something?
How would you improve Amazon’s website?
Should we sell private label cleaning products?
Given an array of n integers, are there elements a, b, c in array such that sum of (a,b,c) equals to a particular target X?
The probability of the product coming from location A is 0.8 and from location B is 0.6. What is the probability the customers will receive the product from location A or location B?
What is your technical background? (Or marketing background, or finance background...)
You can anticipate the specialised questions based on a detailed read of the job description. Evaluate what the role is looking for and the key responsibilities. Understand the fundamental skills and experience for the role. The specialised component of your interview will focus on the most important aspects of the specific role you’re applying for. Technical questions will also vary with the role, but the range of technical questions to expect can be determined from understanding the role, team, and product you’ll be working on.
To prepare effectively
Develop an intuitive understanding of Amazon Leadership Principles and the Amazon culture.
Reflect on your experience through the lens of the Amazon Leadership Principles (see it from the Amazon point of view).
Get to know the range of questions you can expect and how your experience fits into them.
Avoid scripting answers and trying to “give them what they want to hear”. It tends to create stress and leads to insincere interviews. Amazon will see through it.
Amazon already knows you’re an experienced candidate.
You wouldn’t be having the interview otherwise. Trust in your experience.
Our Amazon Interview Guides are now available. Our Essentials guide shows the principles in action using Amazon’s own rich history and deconstructs each principle to its fundamentals. Ideal for busy professionals wanting to fast track their interview preparation.
