Amazon Interview Guide

 

Amazon Interview Guide Description

I can help you – because I’ve been there. Amazon’s Interviews should not be stressful to anybody going through their interview process. That’s why I created this guide for you with the help of my friends currently working at various roles at Amazon. During my tenure at Amazon I have conducted more than 100 interviews with candidates for various teams.

The guide has around 500 answers for various roles to all the Leadership Principles, and I update it regularly with new questions coming up. These are the answers that got me and my friends into Amazon!

I know that if you are interviewing for Amazon, this is the only guide you’ll ever need. That’s why I offer a refund guarantee in case you fail your interviews – and I had not received a single refund request so far.

 

The guide covers all the Amazon interview questions & answers for the following roles (L4 – L8, Associate, Manager, Senior Manager, Principal, GM):

Operations / Supply Chain / Logistics & Transportation / Fulfillment Management: Covers Area Managers, Operation Managers, Supply & Chain Managers, Capacity Delivery Managers, S&OP Managers, Transportation Planning/Program Managers, Instock Managers, Procurement Managers, Network Optimization Manager, Carrier Manager, Delivery Shift Manager, Last Mile Operations, Sort Center Managers and similar roles for Amazon.

Product / Project / Program Management: Covers Product Managers, (Creative) Program Managers, Planning/Project Managers, Technical Program/Product Managers, Production Operations Managers, Digital Program Managers, Analytics & Insights Managers, Product Development Managers, Customer Solution Managers, Enterprise Service Managers and similar roles for Amazon, AWS and all Amazon services/devices globally.

Sales / Advertising / Account Management: Covers Vendor Managers, Sales Account Managers, Category Managers, Key/Enterprise Account Managers, Listing/Catalog Managers, Customer/Client Success Managers, Partner Sales Managers, Complicance Managers, Seller Consultant / SPS Managers, Marketplace Account Managers, 3P Managers and similar roles for Amazon and AWS globally.

Marketing Management: Covers Marketing Managers, Product Marketing Managers, Brand Managers, Digital Marketing Managers, Onsite Marketing Managers, Insights Managers, Performance Marketing Managers, Event Program Managers, Partner Marketing Managers, SEO Managers, Mobile/Affiliate Marketing Managers, Engagement Managers, Content Writers, Public Relations and similar roles for all Amazon and AWS services/products globally.

Finance and Global Business Services: Covers Financial Analysts, Finance Managers, VAT Analysts, FinOps Managers, Risk Managers, Accounting Managers, Payroll Managers, Tax Planning Managers for all Amazon and AWS products/services globally.

The guide also has a “Universal Answer” section, which will be useful for all the other roles including HR and technical roles from a Leadership Interview point of view.

Feel free to read the description below to get more information. Thanks!

 

Amazon Interview Guide: Interviews Questions and Answers + LPs – for all non-engineering candidates globally. (including the 16 Amazon Leadership Principles interview questions and behavioral Amazon interview questions)

Last update of questions: July 4, 2024. (updated to include the two new LP’s & recent interview questions)

* Amazon added two new Leadership Principles (“Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer” and “Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility”) to its list of 14 LP’s, to bring the total to 16. I have since added questions, sample answers and significance information for these new 2 LPs into the Amazon Interview Guide as well.

* The world is changing fast! With the advance of AI tools (OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama), how we do business and who does this business are going through big changes. AI also changed how HR folks and hiring managers conduct their interviews and only the candidates with the best preparation stand a chance in getting hired.

* With the recent hiring slowdown, Amazon is now extra careful with its hiring and offers jobs to only the best performers during the interviews. Make sure you prepare for your interviews with the best sources available.

With the last update, I’ve added more sample answers to the Amazon Interview Guide from recently hired Amazonians to give you an edge during the interviews. Good luck everybody!

 

What is in this Amazon Interview Guide?

This is an interview preparation guide created by current and ex-Amazon employees who had been helping candidates to get into Amazon for a while now.

During our tenure at amazon, we’ve attended many loop interviews within Amazon as an interviewer for a wide variety of roles including (but not limited to) product/program managers, vendor/area managers, ISM, hr/hrbp managers, finance managers, various AVS & 3P roles as well as internships and creative/design roles.

Which roles is this Amazon Interview Guide useful for?

Amazon’s job interviews are unique in such a way that all non engineers get their questions randomly from a nearly fixed set of interview questions (even engineers get these questions in their non-coding interview sessions).

Most probably you have heard that Amazon’s interviews are not easy and you have to answer the questions in a special “Amazonian way” to pass your interviews and impress your recruiters. Answers are expected in the STAR format, but there is also more to answering the questions than just the STAR format!

To date, I’ve sold the Amazon Interview Guide to candidates for many roles (and helped those candidates to get offers) including:

• • Product, program managers

• • Area Managers, fulfillment managers

• • Vendor managers

• • All AWS roles (other than engineers that work on software development)

• • Creative design roles

• • HR / HRBP / Amazon ERC

• • Associates / partner development managers

• • Technical Account, Program and Product managers (TAM/TPM)

• • SDE candidates (for helping with the non-coding part of their interviews)

for levels between L4-L8 and for all regions including US, CA, UK, EU, LATAM and Asia.

Contents of the Amazon Interview Guide

The Amazon Interview Guide (this is a downloadable digital book – pdf) contains two documents: One is a pdf file that gives you all the details unique to Amazon interviews from how to get an offer and interview stages to how to behave during the interviews.

The second doc is an excel sheet that has about 500 questions and their answers/suggested answer approaches from an Amazonian perspective, including the Amazon Leadership Principles questions and behavioral Amazon interview questions.

I used a lot of feedback from our colleagues and interview feedback when creating these answers for the Amazon Interview Guide. These were the answers that got us into Amazon!

Please feel free to scroll through the reviews below to see if some of the information might be relevant to the role you’re applying.

Amazon is an amazing company and its interviews are not easy. Good preparation is key and congrats on taking this seriously! (If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask us a question using the messaging system.)

 

As the reviewers mention below, this Amazon Interview Guide might just be the best investment in your life!

 

Sample Question & Answer from the Amazon Interview Guide

Question:

Many companies like us get thousands of customer feedback every day. Give me an example showing how you tried to come up with a solution to process them better in a previous job and were you successful with this approach in that company?

Significance of the Question (we have this type of significance info for all the questions in the Amazon Interview Guide) : Customer Obsession is arguably the most important one in Amazon’s Leadership Principles, as seen in our motto: “World’s Most Customer-Centric Company”. This specific question is a trick question like many of Amazon’s interview questions: it seems like it is asking how you were able to find ways to process large amounts of data, but actually, the interviewer is also looking for a number of other traits in your answer:

1- Are you answering this question only with a solution to process the data, or are you approaching the issue from a customer-facing position as well? Remember, any good candidate can give an example of a clever solution to process data. You have to “go above and beyond” to make sure your solution makes a difference in customers’ lives as well. As much as trying to solve this issue to help Amazon, you are solving it to serve your customers better.

2- Did you work on this solution alone, or did you influence your colleagues to work on it as well? As the name implies, “Leadership” Principles are looking for that leadership quality in you.

3- Based on your similar experiences in your previous jobs, analyzing the sources of incoming feedback (or any large amounts of data) and finding creative ways to streamline those complex processes is the first answering approach that comes to mind. But remember that any good candidate can do that. Here, the interviewer is looking to see if you only worked on that task, or did you also find ways to make more sense of the work you’re doing although it is not required to do so (e.g., devising a way to make the data more meaningful or applying your solution to other parts of the business).

Note: As you see, Amazon’s interview questions should not be taken as simple, single-directional questions. There is a reason these questions are standardized and used across the organization after so many years of improving them, and there are many sides to every question. Please take note of this when thinking about how to answer other questions in this Excel file.

 

Sample Answer from the Amazon Interview Guide:

This question is relevant for all types of managerial roles. For example, a product/program manager can give an example of the feedback they received for a newly launched product, and a Vendor Manager/ 3P Account Manager can give an example of a large amount of b2b accounts’ feedback they received.

A sample answer for a product manager: I was the PM of a web-based analytics software (SaaS) company that had an e-commerce optimization product for small businesses. The product was very popular among all the sellers of AliExpress, Shopify, Ebay and Amazon globally, and needless to say we were receiving a lot of feedback from our customers. The problem was there were many sources for the customers to provide feedback: in-person, from the mobile app, from the website, from the phone support hotline etc.

These systems were not connected on the backend and it was impossible for us to de-duplicate all the feedback and categorize them. So basically we were not able to act on them. I thought that this lack of transparency should also be frustrating for our clients.

As the PM of the product, I suggested using “tags” to collect feedback. The input text in the mobile and web form were broken down into words, or “tags” with a small piece of code developed by the tech team, and at the end of each phone support call, we asked the clients to give us 5 distinct words as a feedback, and the agents entered those into the tool developed by the tech team.

With this approach, we were able to generate “tag clouds” that showed which keywords were used the most, providing us valuable insights to prioritize projects accordingly. From a customer perspective, we also published these tag clouds on our Support Center page, where they were able to see what we are prioritizing & working in a transparent manner. I also helped my company to adopt this system to share internal feedback for our processes, so that the team could share their requests/feedback with the management/tech team in a quick, transparent and easy way.

As a result of this project, we were able to identify the two biggest pain points of customers that we were not aware of, and after quickly implementing them, the positive feedback rating of the company went up from 3.8 (out of 5) to 4.4 in 1 quarter and customer complaint / all feedbacks ratio dropped 2500bps, which was a significant achievement.

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I’ve put a lot of effort into this Amazon Interview Guide and I’m sure that it will be very useful for you. Congrats on taking the interview preparations seriously and good luck with your interviews!

 

A quick scroll of the contents of the Amazon Interview Guide Excel worksheet (that has 500 answers to all the Amazon interview questions):

 

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