Amazon Interview Preparation

Depending on the role the interviews might be different.

Behavioral and functional interviews will be conducted during each interview loop. What is an interview loop? It’s a groups of individual interviews to assess your strengths and weaknesses.

Behavioral interview questions are designed to assess a candidate's past behaviors and how they might perform in a future role. They often start with phrases like "Tell me about a time when..." or "Give me an example of..." and focus on specific situations. Interviewers use these questions to understand a candidate's skills, problem-solving abilities, and how they handle various situations.

Functional questions are focused on your day to day activities. For a software engineer it will be focused on programming questions. An accountant might be asked something specific to accounting problems or various issues about tax code. Just know this will be the expert experience line of questioning.

Amazon will base all of their questions on the Amazon leadership principles. Behavioral interview questions are designed to assess a candidate's past behaviors and how they might perform in a future role. They often start with phrases like "Tell me about a time when..." or "Give me an example of..." and focus on specific situations. Interviewers use these questions to understand a candidate's skills, problem-solving abilities, and how they handle various situations.

How to prepare for leadership principles? Write 2+ stories for each leadership principles using the STAR method. STAR stands for: Situation: Briefly describe the context or setting of the scenario. Task: Explain what your specific responsibility or goal was in that situation. Action: Detail the specific steps you took to address the task or situation. Result: Share the outcomes or consequences of your actions, highlighting both positive and negative aspects.

This might not address the specific question the interviewer asks but it will help you recall some of your projects and the details of which you can recall during the actual interview.

Hint: if you are ever asked about a project that failed and your reply is something like “I’ve never managed a project that failed”. You already failed the interview. Most people with difficult projects have failed a least once in your career so they are interested in what you did and what you learned in the face of failure. If you didn’t learn anything you probably aren’t the right person for the team.

For the technical functional questions make sure you are at the top of your game. As an example if you are a software engineer I suggest you refresh yourself on the big O notation. Time and complexity are big interview topics. You might even spend some time on https://leetcode.com to make sure you can solve the hardest problems.

Hint: if you are a software engineer and you brute force a solution that is not good enough. Think about the scale of Amazon, your solution needs to be scalable and resilient. Your solution needs to be optimized. If you can’t solve solutions with the big O notation in mind you might need more time to prep.

You must think of this as a once in a lifetime opportunity because if you fail you will have 1-2+ years before you can interview again so prepping is crucial.

If you need 1:1 coaching please reach to me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/Benjamincaparoon

Best of luck!