Amazon Leadership Principles: Current 16-Principle Interview Guide

Amazon currently publishes 16 Leadership Principles and says employees use them every day when discussing projects and deciding how to solve problems.

They also appear throughout Amazon’s current candidate materials. Role-specific interview guides connect behavioral questions to Leadership Principles, the Interview Loop page recommends STAR preparation, the customer-service application guide connects Work Style and Job Simulation to the principles, and technical role guides use them alongside role-specific competencies.

That makes the Leadership Principles a real Amazon hiring framework. It does not mean every assessment question has a public principle label, one hidden “correct” personality answer, or a universal scoring weight that third parties can reproduce.

The examples and explanations on this page are independent educational material. They are not Amazon interview questions, assessment items, internal scoring rubrics or confidential hiring content.

The current 16 Amazon Leadership Principles

Amazon’s current public list contains these 16 principles:

1. Customer Obsession
2. Ownership
3. Invent and Simplify
4. Are Right, A Lot
5. Learn and Be Curious
6. Hire and Develop the Best
7. Insist on the Highest Standards
8. Think Big
9. Bias for Action
10. Frugality
11. Earn Trust
12. Dive Deep
13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
14. Deliver Results
15. Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer
16. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

Use Amazon’s own Leadership Principles page for the authoritative wording. The summaries below are preparation-oriented paraphrases.

Customer Obsession

Focus on customer needs and long-term trust rather than internal convenience alone.

Interview evidence to prepare: a time you improved a customer outcome, resolved a difficult issue, or changed a process because customer impact mattered.

Original practice prompt: Tell me about a time internal efficiency conflicted with customer experience. What did you do and what changed?

Ownership

Take appropriate responsibility for outcomes beyond a narrow task boundary and think about long-term effects.

Interview evidence to prepare: a recurring problem you took responsibility for, a mistake you owned, or an issue you solved across team boundaries.

Invent and Simplify

Look for better and simpler ways to solve problems rather than accepting unnecessary complexity.

Interview evidence to prepare: a process you simplified, an automation you introduced, or a repeated source of error you redesigned.

Are Right, A Lot

Use judgment, evidence and diverse perspectives, and be willing to challenge your own assumptions.

Interview evidence to prepare: a decision made with incomplete information or a case where new evidence caused you to change your mind.

Learn and Be Curious

Keep developing skills, exploring new possibilities and learning from unfamiliar problems.

Interview evidence to prepare: a skill you learned quickly, a new domain you entered, or feedback that changed how you work.

Hire and Develop the Best

Raise the talent bar and help other people grow.

Interview evidence to prepare: coaching, mentoring, improving performance, hiring, onboarding or creating development opportunities.

Insist on the Highest Standards

Protect quality and address defects rather than accepting recurring problems as normal.

Interview evidence to prepare: a quality issue you prevented, a standard you improved, or a root cause you fixed rather than patching repeatedly.

Think Big

Create a larger direction instead of optimizing only the immediate local problem.

Interview evidence to prepare: a proposal that expanded scope, created a new opportunity or changed how a team approached a problem.

Bias for Action

Move with appropriate speed when a decision is reversible and enough information is available, while distinguishing calculated action from recklessness.

Interview evidence to prepare: a time you acted under uncertainty and managed the risk.

Frugality

Use constraints as a reason to be resourceful rather than assuming more budget or headcount is always the answer.

Interview evidence to prepare: delivering an outcome with limited resources or reducing unnecessary cost without reducing quality.

Earn Trust

Listen carefully, communicate candidly and respectfully, and acknowledge your own mistakes or weak points.

Interview evidence to prepare: rebuilding a relationship, delivering difficult feedback, correcting an error or earning credibility with a skeptical stakeholder.

Dive Deep

Stay connected to details and investigate when metrics, anecdotes or assumptions do not line up.

Interview evidence to prepare: finding a hidden root cause, auditing data, or resolving a discrepancy others had overlooked.

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

Raise reasoned disagreement before a decision is final, then support the final authorized decision once it has been made.

Interview evidence to prepare: a respectful disagreement with a leader or team and how you handled the outcome.

Deliver Results

Focus on the important inputs, maintain appropriate quality and finish important work despite setbacks.

Interview evidence to prepare: a difficult target you achieved, a recovery after a setback, or a project where prioritization was essential.

Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer

Create a safer, more supportive and more effective environment where people can grow and perform well.

Interview evidence to prepare: improving team safety, inclusion, development, workload or employee experience.

Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

Consider the wider effects of decisions on communities, partners, employees and the environment as the organization grows.

Interview evidence to prepare: identifying second-order impacts, improving sustainability or considering stakeholders beyond the immediate project.

How Amazon currently uses the principles in interviews

Amazon’s current Interview Loop and role-specific interview guides describe behavioral questioning built around Leadership Principles.

Current Vendor Manager and BIE materials, for example, say a substantial portion of interview conversations focuses on how candidates demonstrated the principles in past work. Those guides recommend specific examples, relevant data or metrics, and the STAR method for structuring responses.

This is stronger evidence than memorizing lists of supposed “Amazon correct answers.”

Leadership Principles and STAR

STAR is a response structure, not a Leadership Principle and not a separate scored test.

Use:

• Situation — enough context for the interviewer to understand the problem;
• Task — what you were responsible for;
• Action — what you personally did and why;
• Result — what changed, including measurable evidence when available.

See the Amazon STAR Method page for detailed practice.

Leadership Principles in Work Style

Amazon’s current customer-service guide explicitly says its Work Style Assessment focuses on Amazon’s culture and Leadership Principles.

It also tells candidates to avoid overthinking individual statements and to answer authentically. That public instruction is important: reviewing the principles should not become an attempt to fabricate a supposedly perfect personality profile.

See the Amazon Work Style Assessment guide for that module.

Leadership Principles in job simulation

Amazon’s current customer-service guide says its Customer Service Job Simulation asks candidates to make decisions based on the Leadership Principles while demonstrating problem-solving, prioritization and interpersonal skills.

That confirms a real connection for that role-specific simulation. It does not prove every Amazon scenario assessment uses the same format or scoring.

See the Amazon Work Simulation Assessment guide for current role boundaries.

How to build a strong interview story bank

Instead of preparing one story per principle, start with real experiences and map each story to the evidence it actually contains.

A practical story bank can include:

• a customer problem;
• a failure or mistake;
• a difficult decision with incomplete data;
• a disagreement;
• a process improvement;
• a quality problem;
• a resource constraint;
• a time you coached someone;
• a time you learned something quickly;
• a result delivered under pressure.

One real story may demonstrate more than one principle. Do not force every example to fit all 16.

Original STAR practice example

Prompt: Tell me about a time you found that a recurring problem was caused by a process rather than an individual mistake.

A strong answer would usually make clear:

• what evidence showed the issue was recurring;
• how you investigated the cause;
• what action you personally took;
• who needed to be involved;
• what changed after the intervention;
• what measurable result or learning followed.

The value of the exercise is in the evidence and reasoning, not in inserting principle names into every sentence.

Common preparation mistakes

Avoid:

• memorizing Amazon’s principle wording without preparing real evidence;
• assuming every principle has one public scoring weight;
• treating commercial answer explanations as Amazon’s official rubric;
• inventing metrics you cannot defend;
• describing only what the team did without explaining your own contribution;
• choosing a story because the principle label sounds right even when the evidence is weak;
• turning Work Style preparation into an attempt to fake a personality profile.

Related Amazon guides

• Amazon Assessment Test
• Amazon Behavioral Interview
• Amazon STAR Method
• Amazon Work Style Assessment
• Amazon Work Simulation Assessment
• Amazon Bar Raiser Interview
• Amazon Hiring Process

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