so Marcus told me over and over. at dinner. over text at like 1am. at a bar where i was not paying attention at all. he kept saying Amazon will hit you with leadership principle questions in the middle of coding rounds and i kept saying yeah yeah i know. i did not know lol.
round three. i have a BFS problem half done on Livecode. my interviewer stops me and asks about a time i pushed back on my manager. like ma'am i have code on this screen. she did not care. wanted a full STAR story right then. i rambled about disagreeing with my tech lead on some migration deadline, it came out messy, she wrote something down and moved on. Marcus had warned me about this exact situation probably four separate times. i bought him a beer once as thanks for the advice and then did not actually follow the advice. classic.
anyway Marcus dragged me to this coffee shop near his place one Saturday. bad pourover, six dollars, tasted like nothing. we were there for three hours. he had me write eight stories from my actual jobs and tag each one with two or three leadership principles. his big thing was specifics. "i reduced latency" tells an interviewer nothing he said. "i cut P99 from 340ms to 120ms after redesigning the cache layer" gives them something for the debrief packet. round two of my onsite i forgot this and slipped into "what i would have done is" territory and the interviewer stopped me cold. "ok but what did you actually do." Marcus called that exact scenario happening. i texted him after, he sent back one emoji, i am not going to say which one.
the recruiter call was normal. forty minutes, resume stuff, comp expectations. then i got a HackerRank link. two coding problems, easy to medium, some multiple choice design stuff, and this personality survey with fifty questions. strongly agree to strongly disagree on things like "i enjoy customer feedback" and "i prefer working alone." Marcus texted me the night before like "yo do not contradict yourself on the survey, they map those answers to the leadership principles." i still do not know if the survey actually matters. but i was too paranoid to treat it casually after that text.
phone screen. thirty minutes on Livecode, syntax highlighting on, no code execution. got a graph traversal problem and i am working through it and the interviewer just pivots to "describe a time you made a decision without complete data." LP question. in the middle of code. i had this one prepped only because Marcus quizzed me over text the week before, otherwise i would have sat there staring. he says roughly half of Amazon phone screens sneak at least one LP into the technical portion and yeah after living through it i believe him.
onsite was five rounds and by round four my brain was soup. three coding, one behavioral, one system design, hiring manager chat on top of all that. every single coding problem was a medium. BFS and sliding window and stacks, over and over. i had been grinding hards for weeks because i was also prepping for Google and literally none of that mattered lol. second coding round the interviewer got visibly annoyed when i went brute force first. Marcus told me "Amazon wants optimal fast, do not waste time building up from naive." i ignored him. i keep doing that.
the Bar Raiser was the scariest part and i never figured out who it was. Marcus told me they are senior people from outside the team who can veto a hire if they think you are below the bar. one person can destroy your entire day of interviews just like that. Marcus claims he figured out his because one round got suddenly way harder than the rest. mine were all equally brutal so i had no clue who was holding the veto lol.
i had InterviewMan running through mocks with Marcus and through the real loop. behavioral rounds were where it helped most because by round four i was mixing up my own stories and forgetting numbers i had used earlier. one interviewer mentioned a metric from two minutes prior and the transcript caught it so i had the exact figure ready. coding rounds it read Livecode and flagged BFS before i finished parsing the problem, which fine i would have gotten there on my own but it shaved off maybe ninety seconds. runs on Chime and HackerRank so the OA and video rounds were both covered. checked dock, Activity Monitor, screen share on both platforms, nothing. twelve bucks a month annual, no session caps. i looked at Interview Coder first because the marketing is good, but it is two ninety nine a month and only handles coding. Amazon does not just test code, the LP questions and system design are what separate candidates. paying twenty five times more for a tool that ignores the hard part made zero sense. Marcus agreed and he is cheap about everything so that says something.
honestly if i could go back i would flip the order completely. two weeks of behavioral before touching leetcode at all. Marcus did it that way and told me his onsite felt calmer because the LP ambushes stopped being surprises. write your stories, tag them with LPs, put real numbers in every single result, do not go over two minutes per answer. system design, know your AWS well enough that you do not sound clueless because the interviewers build on it daily and they know when you actually understand SQS versus SNS or when DynamoDB beats Aurora versus when you are just saying words. and yeah mediums are the whole game. time yourself. Amazon is not throwing you a hard so getting optimal in fifteen minutes matters way more than struggling through a hard in forty. Marcus kept telling me that too and i kept not listening lol.
Ready to Ace Your Next Interview?
Join 57,000+ professionals using InterviewMan to get real-time AI assistance during their interviews.
