How Amazon Scores You on the Leadership Principles

At Google the behavioral round sits off to the side. At Amazon it runs through everything. The 16 Leadership Principles, the LPs, are the company's written culture, and an interviewer scores you against them inside every round you take, the coding ones included. A typical round opens with fifteen to twenty minutes of "tell me about a time you..." before the problem even appears. They are the lens on your loop, scored everywhere rather than in one siloed sitting.

The weight of the LPs is why the behavioral bar rejects so many strong engineers. Around 25 percent of candidates who clear Amazon's technical bar are turned down on LP grounds. A strong set of LP stories can lift a borderline coder over the line. The reverse does not hold. Clean code will not rescue thin behavioral answers. What follows is all 16 principles, the eight an SWE loop leans on hardest, and the one candidates misread most often.