In this article
Before you start
Why interviewers ask this
Amazon decides on evidence from past behavior, and the principles are the shared yardstick. Its jobs site says candidates meet individually with current employees in what it calls the "interview loop," and that each interviewer assesses a different aspect of your skills and experience (Amazon interview page, read October 2026). Its Bar Raiser material says interviewers are helped to ask questions tied to the principles and the competencies each role needs (Amazon on how it hires).
A weak answer names a principle and then speaks in generalities. A strong answer tells one specific story, in the first person, with a decision, a number and a follow-up-ready detail. The preparation to practice has three parts: know the sixteen names, hold a small bank of stories, and be able to go one level deeper on any of them.
The Amazon Leadership Principles from first principles
- Leadership Principles
- The Leadership Principles are the sixteen statements Amazon publishes as the way its people are expected to work; its interviewers use them as the criteria for judging evidence from a candidate's past.
- Bar Raiser
- A Bar Raiser is a trained Amazon volunteer from outside the hiring team who is an interviewer brought into hiring loops as an objective third party, according to How Amazon hires.
In plain words
Think of a restaurant inspector with a printed checklist. Every kitchen is judged on the same sixteen lines. The inspector writes down what they saw, not what they were told. The principles are that checklist, and your stories are the kitchen being inspected. The analogy breaks in one place. The inspector watches today, while an interviewer only hears about the past. So the quality of your evidence depends on how concrete your story is. So the loop rewards specifics over slogans. In one sentence: the principles are sixteen published behaviors, and a behavioral answer is good when one true story shows one or more of them.
Step 1: Group the sixteen by what they ask of you
The sixteen are easier to hold in four groups. The grouping and the plain-words column are ours, made for preparation, and are not Amazon's wording. The names are Amazon's, exactly as published (Amazon Jobs, read October 2026).
| Group | Principle | What it asks, in plain words | Typical prompt |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer and quality | Customer Obsession | Start from what the customer needs and work backwards | Tell me about a time you changed your plan for a customer |
| Customer and quality | Insist on the Highest Standards | Keep quality high even when it is slower or unpopular | Tell me about a time you refused to ship something not good enough |
| Customer and quality | Dive Deep | Know the details, check the data, doubt numbers that clash with stories | Tell me about a time you found the real cause behind a number |
| Customer and quality | Deliver Results | Finish what matters, even when obstacles appear | Tell me about a time you delivered despite a setback |
| Ownership and speed | Ownership | Act on the whole problem, not only your job description | Tell me about a time you fixed something that was not yours |
| Ownership and speed | Bias for Action | Decide and move when speed matters and the choice can be reversed | Tell me about a time you acted without full information |
| Ownership and speed | Frugality | Get more done with fewer resources | Tell me about a time constraints made the result better |
| Ownership and speed | Invent and Simplify | Find a new or simpler way to do the work | Tell me about a time you simplified a process |
| Thinking and learning | Are Right, A Lot | Use sound judgment and seek views that challenge yours | Tell me about a time you changed your mind |
| Thinking and learning | Learn and Be Curious | Keep learning and follow your curiosity into new areas | Tell me about a time you taught yourself something fast |
| Thinking and learning | Think Big | Propose a bolder direction than the obvious one | Tell me about a time you proposed something ambitious |
| Thinking and learning | Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit | Challenge a decision respectfully, then back it fully once made | Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager |
| People, trust and responsibility | Hire and Develop the Best | Raise the bar on who joins and grow the people already there | Tell me about a time you helped someone improve |
| People, trust and responsibility | Earn Trust | Listen, speak candidly and own your mistakes | Tell me about a time you admitted a mistake |
| People, trust and responsibility | Strive to be Earth's Best Employer | Make the workplace better and safer for the people in it | Tell me about a time you improved your team's working life |
| People, trust and responsibility | Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility | Consider the wider effects of what you build | Tell me about a time you weighed side effects of a decision |
The input is the published list; the output is four buckets you can name from memory, each with a one-line meaning you can say aloud. Read down one group at a time and ask which of your real stories fits each row. Rows with no story are your gaps, and Step 2 closes them. Learn the verbs in Amazon's own sentences, because your story should show the verb. For example, Amazon's Dive Deep text says leaders "audit frequently" and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ.
Step-by-step description
- Four groups make sixteen names easier to hold.
- Five stories can cover all sixteen principles.
- Use I and name your own actions.
- Know the numbers and the alternatives.
- Group the sixteen principles by what they ask of you.
- Build a small story bank in which each story evidences several principles.
- Tell each story with your own actions, in the first person.
- Each story needs a fact sheet with numbers and your decision.
Step 2: Build a story bank that covers all sixteen
A story bank is a short list of true stories from your work, each outlined rather than memorized, that together can evidence every principle. MIT's career office advises preparing three to five stories and outlining them so they can be adapted (MIT career office, read October 2026). For sixteen principles that works only if each story carries several.
The worked example below shows the arithmetic on an invented bank of six stories. With each story tagged to four or five principles, five of the six already reach all sixteen, and the sixth is backup.1 Seven of the sixteen principles are evidenced by one story only, so a follow-up that probes that story leaves you no second example. Choose stories in which you faced a trade-off, changed your mind or measured something; those carry more principles than a story where everything went to plan.
Step 3: Say what you did, not what the team did
Say "I" for your own actions. MIT's guide recommends first-person statements to show ownership, and for team examples to focus on how you contributed to the team's outcome rather than describing the group's work as "we." The interviewer is scoring you, and a story told in "we" gives them nothing to score.
Time follows the same logic. MIT suggests about 20% of the answer for the situation, 10% for the task, 60% for the action and 10% for the result, as a guide and not a strict rule. Action gets the most because it is the part that shows the principle. A good test for any sentence in your action section is whether a colleague could say it about themselves. If they could, replace it with the specific thing you decided, wrote, measured or said.
Text description of the diagram
- MIT suggests 20% of the answer for the situation, 10% for the task, 60% for the action and 10% for the result.
- Action gets the most time because it shows the principle.
Step 4: Prepare the follow-ups, with numbers
An interviewer may dig into one story with follow-ups, so each story needs a fact sheet. Write down the size of the problem, your decision, the alternative you rejected and why, the result as a number with its unit, and what you would do differently. Without numbers the answer sounds like a claim; with numbers it is evidence.
Check each story against its tagged principles by asking the direct question for each one. For Customer Obsession, what did the customer need and how did you know? For Ownership, what did you do that was outside your job description? For Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit, what was your objection, and how did you act once the decision was made? The answers to these are the second level of the story, and they are where interviewers separate rehearsed stories from real ones.
Knowing it is half the job. Saying it is the other half.
Interview Clozo is an AI interview copilot for real interview rounds: it hears the question and puts a strong answer on your screen, and you say it in your own words. See the features or how it works.
Start Free Trial →Worked example
The bank below is invented to show the method; your stories come from your own work. Each story is tagged with the principles it can honestly evidence.1
| Story | What happened (invented) | Principles it evidences | Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Fixed a recurring customer complaint | Customer Obsession, Ownership, Dive Deep, Deliver Results | 4 |
| B | Simplified a process on a small budget | Invent and Simplify, Bias for Action, Frugality, Deliver Results | 4 |
| C | Disagreed with a decision, then committed | Are Right, A Lot; Bias for Action; Earn Trust; Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit | 4 |
| D | Mentored a new teammate | Learn and Be Curious, Hire and Develop the Best, Earn Trust, Strive to be Earth's Best Employer | 4 |
| E | Traced a defect to its root cause | Ownership, Are Right, A Lot; Insist on the Highest Standards; Dive Deep | 4 |
| F | Proposed a bigger idea and weighed its side effects | Customer Obsession, Invent and Simplify, Learn and Be Curious, Think Big, Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility | 5 |
To redo the arithmetic, start with F (5 principles), add the story that brings the most new ones (E, for 9 in total), then D (12), B (15) and C (16); A adds nothing new. The seven principles on one story only are Hire and Develop the Best, Insist on the Highest Standards, Think Big, Frugality, Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit, Strive to be Earth's Best Employer, and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility.
| Measure | Result (illustrative) |
|---|---|
| Leadership Principles published by Amazon | 16 |
| Stories in the illustrative bank | 6 |
| Principles evidenced by all six stories | 16 |
| Smallest set of stories that covers all 16 | 5 (stories B, C, D, E, F) |
| Principles covered by the best first story | 5 |
| Coverage as stories are added, best first | 5, 9, 12, 15, 16, 16 |
| Principles evidenced by one story only | 7 |
Text description of the diagram
- The first story covers five principles.
- Coverage rises to 9, 12, 15 and 16 as stories are added, best first.
- The sixth story adds nothing new.
The best first story, a proposal that weighed side effects, covers Customer Obsession, Invent and Simplify, Learn and Be Curious, Think Big and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. The sixth story, a fix for a recurring customer complaint, adds no new principle but gives a second example for Customer Obsession, Ownership, Dive Deep and Deliver Results. That is its job: backup for a follow-up on a thin principle.
The computation is a small set-cover search. This is an excerpt of the saved assets/data/story-coverage.py, where stories maps each story to its principle numbers in Amazon's published order:
smallest = next(k for k in range(1, len(stories) + 1)
if any(set(x for name in combo for x in stories[name]) == set(range(1, 17))
for combo in itertools.combinations(stories, k)))
print(smallest) # 5It finds five as the smallest cover. Real stories will not tag so neatly, so treat the output as a method, not a target: the goal is no principle without a story, and the weakest ones with two.
Trade-offs and edge cases
Do not force a principle. An interviewer who hears a story bent to fit "Frugality" will ask a follow-up that exposes it. Tag a story only with principles it honestly shows.
The Bar Raiser is not a veto in Amazon's own wording. Amazon says there are more than 3,600 Bar Raisers as of October 2026, volunteers from roles such as product management, software engineering, human resources and marketing, trained on the sixteen principles, whose goal is that each hire has skills "better than 50% of their would-be peers in similar roles" (About Amazon). That page does not mention a veto and says the Bar Raiser and hiring manager together make the final decision. Amazon's pages do not mention a veto, so do not plan around one.
Process details vary. Amazon's pages describe a series of interviews with several interviewers and do not give a fixed number or order, so treat counts you read elsewhere as unconfirmed. Different roles, different weight. The sixteen apply to everyone, and a role may stress some of them more, so read the job description for the verbs it uses. The behavioral round is part of a wider loop; see interview loops for how rounds fit together, and the leadership interview hub for management-level questions. Related guides cover tell me about yourself, questions to ask the interviewer, the Anthropic interview process for a different loop, and engineering management.
| Fact | Value |
|---|---|
| Number of Leadership Principles (Amazon Jobs, read October 2026) | 16 |
| Bar Raisers at Amazon (About Amazon, read October 2026) | more than 3,600 |
| Bar Raiser goal for each hire | better than 50% of would-be peers in similar roles |
| Stories MIT suggests preparing | 3 to 5 |
| MIT's suggested STAR split | 20% situation, 10% task, 60% action, 10% result |
How to answer it in an interview
Tell me about a time you were stuck on a project and found a way through.
On a reporting project I was the only owner when the nightly job started missing its deadline. I measured first: the slowest step took most of the runtime, so I rewrote that one query, tested it on a copy of the data and rolled it out behind a check that compared old and new totals. Runtime fell by half and the check caught one rounding difference before release. I also wrote down why I had not rewritten the whole job. What I would change is adding the timing alert earlier.
The spoken structure is: the context in two sentences, the actions in the first person, the result as a number, then one thing you would change.
Common mistakes
"We launched the feature and the customers loved it." (wrong) It hides your part. (right) "I wrote the proposal, I ran the pilot with twelve customers, and I changed the design after the second week."
Reciting all sixteen principles by name. (wrong) Names are not evidence. (right) "Here is one story, and the principle it shows is Dive Deep."
Bending a story to fit a principle. (wrong) The follow-up exposes it. (right) Use the principles the story actually shows and say so plainly.
A result with no number. (wrong) "It went well." (right) "Runtime fell by half" with the unit and the time frame.
Follow-up questions
What do you say to an Amazon question about an incident when you were stuck in a project and found a way to solve it?
Pick a story where you were the person blocked, say what you tried first and why it failed, then name the change of approach and the measured result. The model answer above shows the shape.
What are the Amazon Leadership Principles?
The Amazon Leadership Principles are sixteen statements Amazon publishes about how its people are expected to work, from Customer Obsession to Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. The table in Step 1 lists all sixteen with what each asks in plain words.
What are Amazon Leadership Principles interview questions?
Amazon Leadership Principles interview questions are behavioral questions, usually "tell me about a time when...", each aimed at evidence for one or more principles. The Typical prompt column in Step 1 gives one example per principle; Amazon does not publish an official question list.
Can one story cover several Leadership Principles?
Yes, and it has to, because three to five stories cannot cover sixteen one by one. In the worked example one story evidences five principles and the best five stories reach all sixteen.1
What if you only have three strong stories?
Choose the three that carry the most principles and prepare second examples for the rest. In the worked example the best three stories reach 12 of the 16 principles, so the other four need a different story or an honest "I do not have a strong example, but here is a related one".1
- The Amazon Leadership Principles are sixteen published statements used as interview criteria.
- Prepare a story bank, not sixteen answers: five stories can cover all sixteen in the worked example.
- Say what you did, in the first person; about 60% of a STAR answer is action.
- Prepare numbers and rejected alternatives for the follow-ups.
- Amazon's pages describe the Bar Raiser as an objective interviewer; they do not mention a veto.
Sources
- Amazon leadership principles — Amazon Jobs (no page date shown; date = read date), 24 Oct 2026
- Amazon Bar Raiser — About Amazon (no page date shown; date = read date), 24 Oct 2026
- How Amazon hires — About Amazon (no page date shown; date = read date), 24 Oct 2026
- In-person interview: what to expect — Amazon Jobs (no page date shown; date = read date), 24 Oct 2026
- Using the STAR method for your next behavioral interview — MIT Career Advising & Professional Development (date = read date), 24 Oct 2026
