How To Interview with Amazon (My Experience)

The past few days, I’ve been teaching myself how to interview with Amazon. Early in the week, Amazon reached out regarding a technical phone screen. In their email, they highlight the importance of their leadership principles. After intense google searching and watching YouTube videos, here’s what I learned and how I plan to tie in my personal experiences with Amazon’s leadership principles.

February 29, 2024 by Kazu Fujimoto

To even get to this point, before you need to know how to interview with amazon, you need to have a resume that is:

• ATS compliant
• Clear and concise
• Quantifies your results and accomplishments

I made the recent shift in my resume to quantify my results and accomplishments, and the results are game changing. It’s a real confidence booster when a FAANG company sets up an interview with you.

What I recommend for a technical phone screen is have an answer ready for each leadership principle along with having answers to general behavioral questions. My interview is set this Tuesday.

Amazon Leadership Principles Overview

All answers must be presented in a STAR format. Situation, task, action, and result. I made sure to be prepared for each and every question regarding Amazon’s Leadership Principles.

Dan Croitor has some great videos regarding preparation how to interview with Amazon that you should check out.

Given the below points regarding Amazon’s Leadership principles, I was ready to answer any of the behavioral questions.

Customer Obsession

If asked about my favorite, I would use this one. Without customers, a company would have no revenue, and as a result, would not be capable of any business operations.

Ownership

Use the manufacturing plans that I have created as a Manufacturing Engineer, as an onboard engineer. From those said manufacturing plans, I became the focal point, and we built our flight hardware using those manufacturing plans. I then transitioned to becoming the lead for the Engineering Development Unit because of my efforts in creating said build plans.

Invent and Simplify

Utilize something that I have invented, and deliver and explain metrics to show how I invented and simplified.

Are Right, A lot

Here I had an answer utilizing that, as a team lead for a specific project, I have to be right, a lot. I’m responsible for creating RCIs (request for change/information) that have a fundamental impact on the integrity of our product. It’s important to review with all stakeholders such that we disposition the RCIs correctly.

Learn and Be Curious

I had an example of where I had to be curious in order to figure out the cause of a failure as a result of root cause analysis. This is a perfect example to use a STAR format answer for your interview.

Hire and Develop the Best

Unfortunately, I’ve only been an engineer for 5 years and as a result haven’t had any management experience. Fortunately, I have had experience interviewing interns, so I had an example for this, if needed.

Insist on the Highest Standards

Throughout my career, I have strived to achieve the highest metrics both for myself and for the customer. I didn’t just do this because I cared about getting promoted, I internally felt this way.

Another key thing when coming up with answers to these leadership principles is, internalize the answers that you select, given your experiences.

Think Big

I tied in one of my game changing projects at what I did at one of my companies here – a configurable, pre-programmable bill of materials. At my company, Bills of Materials (BOMs) were filled out manually and as a result, there were many errors. As a consequence of these errors, these would cause non-conformances, which wasted both time and money. Replacing the need to manually type part numbers into the bill of materials resulted in a game changing way of how we do things.

Bias for Action

Think of calculated risks that you have taken here.

An example of how I took calculated risk was, the deliverable condition of a product that I was responsible for.

Do I either:

A – Provide the product as is in a certain deadline, given the fact that it does not reflect the latest engineering?

B – Send the products that don’t reflect engineering out for re-work, which puts the entire project in a time crunch. (This would be the more risk-on approach.)

Frugality

See my project there regarding “Think Big” and tie that in to Frugality. In any type of interview setting, you will need quick on the feet problem solving skills so that you’ll be prepared. Always expect curve balls in an interview, because interviewers will love to see your thought process.

Earn Trust

To earn trust, I had to demonstrate competence. I demonstrated competence in my engineering career and became the lead for the Engineering Unit we were building. What I did to demonstrate competence was prove that I knew what I was talking about and deliver results.

I simply have an example here where I started off as a junior manufacturing engineer, proved myself, and then showed that I can handle the lead role.

Dive Deep

Dive deep is an easy one for engineers. In engineering, there are many instances where things don’t go the way we planned, and as a result, we need to dive deep and investigate. This investigation can consist of activities such as looking through emails, calculations, or deep inside a complex 3D assembly. I had many of these in my bag that I was ready to provide an answer too.

Have Backbone; Disagree

Have you ever disagreed with your team members or managers about a technical issue that had a big impact? I have had plenty, and can bring up many scenarios where I had to disagree technically with colleagues, to meet customer needs.

Deliver Results

I always stress the importance of using quantifiable results and accomplishments in the resumes that I write. As a result of being so metric driven, it is very easy to answer questions pertaining to results.

Side note – whenever you are in a meeting with executives, always ask about how metrics. Use the answers that the executives give, and focus your work on improving those metrics they provide. Add those metrics in your resumes, and see the job interviews start flowing in. 🤑

Apply this framework on how to interview with Amazon, and as a result the behavioral portion should be easy.