Behavioral interviews

Practice the behavioral round out loud

An interviewer asks about your past work, follows up on what your answer left out, and shows you which of your own words counted. Speak or type, pick your level, and practice Amazon's Leadership Principles if they are in your loop.

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2 questions are free to practice as often as you like.

Four things about this round

  1. Don't underestimate it. Here the interviewer can't see your skills, only the impression your stories leave. A strong engineer who tells vague stories comes across as a weak one, and that impression is what goes into the write-up.
  2. The questions repeat. A coding or system design round can ask almost anything. Behavioral questions come back to the same few patterns: a disagreement, a mistake, a deadline, a problem nobody owned. That makes it the one round you can walk into fully prepared.
  3. Have the story ready before the question ends. If you have to search your memory for an example in the room, the answer comes out slow and shapeless. Practice until the right story comes to mind at once, so your time goes into telling it, not finding it.
  4. Details make it real. The system's name, the number before and after, what you did yourself and why. Follow-up questions go after exactly these, and a story you lived holds up under them.

How the practice works

  1. Pick a question or a mock interview. Choose your level, and Amazon if it's in your loop. Answer out loud or type.
  2. The interviewer follows up. After your first answer it asks about what the answer left out: what you did yourself, the result, why it mattered, what you'd do differently, or the one thing the question is really about. It never tells you what a strong answer contains.
  3. You see what counted. For each of those points: met, partly or missing, with the words of yours that earned it marked in the conversation. A spoken answer also shows how long you spent on each part of the story.

What the feedback looks like

One spoken answer to an example question, as the report shows it. Below the points is the conversation, with the words that counted marked.

Question 1Customer and impactStrong answer

Tell me about a time you made a system faster or cheaper to run.

  • Your own actionsMetdrawn out by a follow-up

    “I turned on the query log for one night run and sorted the queries by time”

    The first answer said what the team found. Asked, you named what you did yourself.

  • Finding where the time wentMetdrawn out by a follow-up

    “One query took five of the six hours”

    You measured before you changed anything, and named what the measurement showed.

  • The result, measuredMet

    “After that the job ran in about forty minutes”

    A number for the outcome, set against the six hours it started from.

  • Why it matteredMet

    “twice that month the reports weren't ready in the morning”

    Who was hurt and how, in one sentence.

  • What you learnedPartlydrawn out by a follow-up

    “I'd probably look at the slow queries earlier next time”

    A lesson, but a vague one: not what you changed in how you work afterwards.

Your first answer, by time
SituationActionOther
Situation 0:09Action 0:16Result 0:03Other 0:09
Length
0:37
Pace
164 wpm
"I" / "we"
1 / 1
Numbers
4
Pauses over 3 s
1
The conversation, with what counted marked
Interviewer

Tell me about a time you made a system faster or cheaper to run.

You

At my last job our nightly reports job started taking over six hours, and it had to finish before the sales team came in at eight. We looked at it as a team and found that most of the time went into one query. I rewrote that query to read only the last day of orders instead of the whole table, and added an index on the order date. After that the job ran in about forty minutes. It mattered because twice that month the reports weren't ready in the morning and the sales leads had to call customers without them.

The result, measuredWhy it mattered
Interviewer

You said the team looked at it together. What did you do yourself to find that query?

probing: Your own actions
You

I turned on the query log for one night run and sorted the queries by time. One query took five of the six hours, so that's the one I rewrote. I checked the new version against a week of old reports before we switched over.

Your own actionsFinding where the time went
Interviewer

Looking back, what would you do differently?

probing: What you learned
You

I'd probably look at the slow queries earlier next time, before it became a problem.

What you learned

All 25 questions

By theme. The ones marked free can be practiced without a plan, as often as you like; the rest come with Nyrion Pro. With Amazon picked, each is asked as the Leadership Principle shown under it.

Ownership and delivery

Problems nobody owned, deadlines at risk, getting things shipped with what you had.

  • Tell me about a time you took responsibility for a problem that wasn't yours to solve, because you could see it would go wrong if nobody did.Amazon: Ownership · Free, practice it →
  • Tell me about a time you had to deliver by a date that couldn't move, and it became clear you couldn't do everything that was planned. What did you do?Amazon: Deliver Results
  • Tell me about a time you had to act quickly, before you had all the information you wanted. What did you do, and how did it turn out?Amazon: Bias for Action
  • Tell me about a time you delivered something with fewer people, less time or less money than you would have wanted.Amazon: Frugality

Conflict and collaboration

Disagreeing with a manager or a peer, people who were hard to work with, other teams.

  • Tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision made by your manager or by a more senior engineer.Amazon: Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit · Free, practice it →
  • Tell me about a time you worked with someone who was hard to work with. What made it hard, and what did you do about it?Amazon: Earn Trust
  • Tell me about a time you needed something from another team that had different priorities. How did you get it done?Amazon: Earn Trust
  • Tell me about a time you had to tell a colleague something they didn't want to hear.Amazon: Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

Leadership and influence

Leading without authority, helping someone grow, setting a direction others followed.

  • Tell me about a time you got people who didn't report to you to change how they worked or what they built.Amazon: Think Big
  • Tell me about a time you helped someone on your team get better at their job.Amazon: Hire and Develop the Best
  • Tell me about a time you proposed something much bigger or different from what was planned.Amazon: Think Big
  • Tell me about a time you made your team a better place to work: how it ran, how people felt, or how new people joined.Amazon: Strive to be Earth's Best Employer

Ambiguity and judgment

Unclear goals, decisions without all the data, finding a simpler way.

  • Tell me about a time you started work when the goal or the requirements were unclear. How did you decide what to build?Amazon: Are Right, A Lot
  • Tell me about a hard decision you made without all the data you wanted.Amazon: Are Right, A Lot
  • Tell me about a time you found a much simpler way to do something your team was doing in a complicated way.Amazon: Invent and Simplify

Failure and growth

Mistakes, hard feedback, learning something new under pressure.

  • Tell me about a mistake you made at work that had real consequences. What happened next?Amazon: Earn Trust
  • Tell me about a time you got critical feedback about your work. What did you do with it?Amazon: Learn and Be Curious
  • Tell me about a time you had to learn a new area quickly to get something done.Amazon: Learn and Be Curious
  • Tell me about a project you worked on that failed or didn't reach its goal.

Customer and impact

What you changed for the people using it, and the difference your work made.

  • Tell me about a time you changed what you were building because of what you learned about the people using it.Amazon: Customer Obsession
  • Tell me about a time a customer or a stakeholder asked for something you thought was wrong for them. What did you do?Amazon: Customer Obsession
  • Tell me about the piece of work you're proudest of for the difference it made to users or to the business.

Project deep dive

One project in technical depth: what was hard, what you decided and why.

  • Walk me through the most technically challenging project you've worked on. What was hard about it, and what was your part?
  • Tell me about a time something looked fine on the surface, a dashboard, a test run or a report, but you suspected a problem underneath. How did you find out what was going on?Amazon: Dive Deep
  • Tell me about a time you held back something from shipping because it wasn't good enough, or pushed to make it better than was required.Amazon: Insist on the Highest Standards

Mock interviews

A mock interview asks 3 questions back to back, one from each of three themes or all from the theme you pick, with follow-ups; a mixed one takes about 45 minutes. It ends with a hiring verdict (Strong hire, Hire, Lean hire or No hire) and the one change that would help your answers most, with a sentence of yours rewritten from your own facts. A single question gets feedback on the story but no verdict: one answer is not a hiring decision.

What each level expects

The level you pick changes what a strong story has to show.

  • Entry level. Stories may come from internships, university or side projects. A strong story shows they owned a well-defined piece of work, asked for help at the right time and finished it.
  • Mid level. A strong story shows they owned a feature or component end to end, made their own technical decisions, and worked with people outside their team when the work needed it.
  • Senior. A strong story shows they led work that spanned several people or teams, made trade-offs with a cost to the business in view, and raised the standard of the people around them.
  • Staff and above. A strong story shows they set technical direction across teams or the organisation, changed what other teams did without authority over them, and the effect lasted after they stepped away.

Amazon's Leadership Principles

Pick Amazon and each question is asked as the principle it tests. All 16 principles, by the theme they belong to:

  • Ownership and delivery: Ownership, Bias for Action, Frugality and Deliver Results.
  • Conflict and collaboration: Earn Trust and Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.
  • Leadership and influence: Hire and Develop the Best, Think Big and Strive to be Earth's Best Employer.
  • Ambiguity and judgment: Invent and Simplify and Are Right, A Lot.
  • Failure and growth: Learn and Be Curious.
  • Customer and impact: Customer Obsession and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility.
  • Project deep dive: Insist on the Highest Standards and Dive Deep.

How Amazon's coding rounds run is on the Amazon interview page.

Frequently asked, briefly answered

Do I need a microphone?

No. Choose typed answers when you begin and the interview runs as a chat. Spoken answers need a microphone and a browser that lets the page use it.

Is my voice recorded?

Each spoken answer is turned into text and the recording is thrown away. Only the text is kept, for your feedback.

Is this the STAR method?

The feedback splits your first answer into situation, task, action, result and reflection, and shows how much of the answer each took. It doesn't ask you to recite a template: it checks what your story contains.

Which companies does it cover?

Amazon, with each question asked as one of its Leadership Principles. Without a company you get the questions as they are written on this page.

What is free?

2 questions, as often as you like: “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision made by your manager or by a more senior engineer.” and “Tell me about a time you took responsibility for a problem that wasn't yours to solve, because you could see it would go wrong if nobody did.”. Every other question, practice by theme and mock interviews come with Nyrion Pro.

How long does one question take?

15 minutes at most, 25 for a project deep dive, follow-ups included.

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