Just an example of what a behavioral interview process looks like at a top company and an excuse to explore sample behavioral questions and the STAR / SBI response techniques. Shooting for a FAANG company during your first job search is an extremely challenging path but it happens every day to Computer Science and Bootcamp graduates alike. With that said many developers wait until their second job search to consider taking the challenge on, while many other developers are simply not interested in a FAANG career path.
Most of the information in this readme is taken directly from various free resources provided by Amazon. Many of these questions will seem like they are geared towards developers with 2+ years experience but you absolutely can successfully respond to these behavioral questions with no experience in the industry, as is the case with many if not most behavioral questions from software companies.
"Leadership Principles are used when discussing ideas for new projects or deciding on the best approach to solving a problem. All job candidates are evaluated based leadership principles (at certain companies). The best way to prepare for an interview that might cover these specific leadership principles is to consider how you’ve applied these Leadership Principles in your previous professional experience." [from Amazon]
- Practice using the STAR method to answer the behavioral-based interview questions listed below, incorporating examples from the Leadership Principles.
- Ensure each answer has a beginning, middle, and end. Describe the situation or problem, the actions you took, and the outcome.
- Prepare short descriptions of a handful of different situations and be ready to answer follow-up questions with greater detail. Select examples that highlight your unique skills.
- Have specific examples that showcase your experience, and demonstrate that you’ve taken risks, succeeded, failed and grown in the process.
- Specifics are key; avoid generalizations. Give a detailed account of one situation for each question you answer, and use data or metrics to support your example.
- Be forthcoming and straightforward. Don't embellish or omit parts of the story.
- "Tell me about a time when..." means you're being asked a Leadership Principle question
- SBI = Situation, Behavior, Impact
- Situation: What was it that your team was trying to achieve
- Behavior: What was your plan of action? What did you do?
- Impact: What was the outcome? (measure impact with data) ie
- How many customers did you impact?
- What was the dollar value in business?
- Come up with 6 work-related STAR experiences
- figure out how they would be adapted to the Leadership Principles, you don't need a different experience for each LP
- "Tell me about a time when you had to make a deciscion between two different technology choices."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to make a deciscion at work, but you didn't have all the data available (that you'd like)."
- Didn't quantify the impact
- Wasn't clear specifically what you did
- "We knew there was an issue (how?) so we did a roleback (what specifically did you do though?)."
- A: "I knew there was an issue because I recieved an alarm, I was on call."
- A: "So I started looking at some of our dashboards and saw there was a big drop in our order count. That usually signifies that somethings gone south for the customer."
- A: "The problem was that I didn't have enough time to figure out what had gone wrong at a root level."
- A: "I knew I couldn't solve this by myself because our system is quite large."
- A: "So I set up a conference call with other engineers on the team and started a divide and conquer process."
- A: "Nominated other engineers to start looking into different aspects of the problem and triaging."
- A: "Once we hit about hour four, we didn't know the exact impact on the customer but it was too risky to leave this feature live in production so I made the call to do a rollback."
- Q: "How did you know you wanted to do a rollback instead of continuing to investigate?"
- A: "There's a point of diminishing returns with this kind of investigation."
- A: "But we had a couple of customer service calls and it's a good best practice to address it immediately and allow for time to go back and do the root cause analysis."
- Q: "And what was the follow-up on this?"
- A: "A couple of days of detailed investigation on what the customer impact was in terms of number of customers effected and what the dollar amount of that was, but also trying to root cause what the subsystem failure was."
- A: "Once we had identified the problem we came up with a plan of action on how to mitigate it."
- A: "I was responsible for getting all the partner teams that were involved on board, organizing testing and ulitimately deploying again."
- Q: "Have you seen this issue happen again since?"
- A: "No because we effectively root caused it."
- A: "But it allowed us to expand our regression test suite."
The STAR method is a structured manner of responding to a behavioral-based interview question by discussing the specific situation, task, action, and result of what you're describing. Here’s what it looks like:
Describe the situation that you were in, or the task that you needed to accomplish. Give enough detail for the interviewer to understand the complexities of the situation. This example can be from a previous job, school project, volunteer activity, or any relevant event.
What goal were you working toward?
Describe the actions you took to address the situation with an appropriate amount of detail, and keep the focus on you. What specific steps did you take? What was your particular contribution? Be careful that you don’t describe what the team or group did when talking about a project. Let us know what you actually did. Use the word “I,” not “we,” when describing actions.
Describe the outcome of your actions and don’t be shy about taking credit for your behavior. What happened? How did the event end? What did you accomplish? What did you learn? Provide examples using metrics or data if applicable.
Consider your own successes and failures in relation to the Leadership Principles. Have specific examples that showcase your expertise, and demonstrate how you’ve taken risks, succeeded, failed and grown in the process. Keep in mind, some of Amazon’s most successful programs have risen from the ashes of failed projects. Failure is a necessary part of innovation. It’s not optional. We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right.
What was it that your team was trying to achieve?
What was your plan of action? What did you do?
What was the outcome? (measure impact with data) How many customers did you impact? What was the dollar value in business?
Youtube Video of Jeff Bezos Discussing Each Principle
Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
- "Tell me about a time when you had to make a deciscion about how to best serve a customer or group of costomers."
Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say, “that’s not my job."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to make a deciscion between long-term value or short-term results."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to make a deciscion between acting on behalf of the entire company or just your team."
Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here." As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.
- "Tell me about a time when you had to innovate or invent a solution."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to make a deciscion about simplification."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to look for new ideas."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to do something new."
- "Tell me about a time when you were misunderstood by a team member or supervisor."
Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.
- "Tell me about a time when you were right about a judgement or deciscion you made."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to make a judgment based on instinct."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to seek out other perspectives."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to disconfirm a belief you had or a decision you made."
Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.
- "Tell me about a time when you had to keep learning to accomplish a task."
- "Tell me about a time when you sought out an oppourtunity to improve yourself at work."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to keep learning to accomplish a task."
Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.
- "Tell me about a time when you had to keep learning to accomplish a task."
- "Tell me about a time when you sought out an oppourtunity to improve yourself at work."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to keep learning to accomplish a task."
Leaders have relentlessly high standards — many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.
- "Tell me about a time when you had to make a decision about how to enforce high standards."
- "Tell me about a time when you raised the bar for your team."
- "Tell me about a time when you were challanged to deliver a high quality product."
Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.
- "Tell me about a time when you had to think big to accomplish something at work."
- "Tell me about a time when you accomplished something at work through bold action."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to think differently and look ahead to serve your customers."
Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.
- "Tell me about a time when you had to work under a deadline that seemed impossible."
- "Tell me about a time when you made a deciscion at work that had to be reversed or corrected later."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to take a risk on a project at work."
Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.
- "Tell me about a time when you had to make due with limited resources at work."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to be self-sufficient in a challenging work situation."
Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.
- "Tell me about a time when you had to communicate something negative at work while remaining respectful and positive."
- "Tell me about a time when you miscommunicated something to a coworker and had to correct the miscommunication."
- "Tell me about a time when you had to communicate a mistep you made in a leadership role."
Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.
- "Tell me about a time when you performed a duty outside or beneath your job description."
- "Tell me about a time when you discovered that something was being miscommunicated by a coworker."
Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.
- "Tell me about a time when you had to work with a decision that you disagreed with."
- "Tell me about a time when you challenged a decision that was made by a teammate or superior."
Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.
- "Tell me about a time when you worked through setbacks to meet a deadline at work."
Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what's next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees' personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
- "Tell me about a time when you were the earth's best employer." (joke)
- "Tell me about a time when you did something to make your work environment better for your teammates."
- "Tell me about a time when you helped other members of your team grow."
- "Tell me about a time when you helped empower other members of your team."
- "Tell me about a time when you helped make your work environment more fun while still remaining productive and on task."
We started in a garage, but we're not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.
- "Tell me about a time when you dealt with an issue related to scaling at work."
- "Tell me about a time when you went the extra mile to help a customer."