I just finished the Amazon interview loop, and it is definitely a different beast compared to other Big Tech interviews. The biggest thing to realize is that they don't just care about your code; they are obsessed with their Leadership Principles (LPs). Almost every round was a 50/50 split between technical problems and behavioral questions.

The Online Assessment (OA)

It started with two LeetCode Mediums—mostly focused on Arrays and Strings. After the coding, there’s a work simulation where you have to rank responses to typical workplace scenarios. My advice: always pick the answer that prioritizes the customer or takes long-term ownership.

The Phone Screen

This was a one-hour call with an engineer. We spent the first 20 minutes talking about my past projects using the STAR method. Then we jumped into a coding question involving a Linked List. It wasn't "hard" difficulty, but they really wanted to see how I handled edge cases and explained my logic.

The Onsite "Loop"

This was the marathon—four back-to-back rounds. Each one was an hour long, and every single interviewer started with 2 or 3 deep-dive behavioral questions.

• Round 1 (Logical Maintainability): This was basically an Object-Oriented Design round. I had to design a system (like a library or parking lot) and explain how I’d make the code clean and extensible.
• Round 2 (Data Structures): A classic LeetCode-style round. I got a Graph problem that required BFS. They really pushed me on time and space complexity.
• Round 3 (System Design): Since I was going for a slightly more experienced role, we talked about scaling, load balancers, and choosing between SQL and NoSQL.
• Round 4 (The Bar Raiser): This was the toughest one. The interviewer wasn't on the hiring team and really grilled me on my behavioral stories to see if I actually lived the LPs.

The biggest takeaway for me was having at least two solid stories ready for every single Leadership Principle. If you can’t back up your technical skills with "Customer Obsession" or "Deliver Results" stories, the coding won't save you.

Have you started mapping out your STAR stories yet, or are you still mostly grinding LeetCode?