Amazon

What to know about the loop

• 116 Leadership Principles. Two stories per principle is the prep minimum. The Bar Raiser will go three follow-ups deep on the LPs they pick.
• 2Bar Raiser is an interviewer from outside the hiring team. Their job is to make sure you raise the bar of the org. They have veto power.
• 3Every round has LP questions. Even the coding rounds.
• 4Hiring manager round comes last. If you reach it, the technical bar is already cleared.
• 5Loops vary by org. AWS leans more on system design, Retail leans more on LPs.

> **How current is this?** Checked 3 August 2026. Amazon publishes the 16 Leadership Principles and the Bar Raiser role. Everything else here is what candidates consistently report, not something the company publishes. Loops change without announcement, so treat this as a guide rather than a specification.

Amazon's loop is built around the 16 Leadership Principles. Walking in without LP stories is the most common reason candidates fail, even strong engineers.

Every interviewer asks two LP questions and writes their notes against the principles. The Bar Raiser specifically probes them at depth.

The 16 LPs in 2026 are: Customer Obsession, Ownership, Invent and Simplify, Are Right A Lot, Learn and Be Curious, Hire and Develop the Best, Insist on the Highest Standards, and Think Big.

The rest are: Bias for Action, Frugality, Earn Trust, Dive Deep, Have Backbone Disagree and Commit, Deliver Results, Strive to be Earth's Best Employer, and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility.

The last two were added in 2021. Most interviewers focus on the original 14, but the Bar Raiser sometimes probes the newer two, especially at SDE3 and above.

Comp is unusual. The RSU schedule is 5 percent in Year 1, 15 percent in Year 2, 40 percent in Year 3, 40 percent in Year 4.

Year 1 and Year 2 sign-on bonuses make up the difference. If you leave before Year 3, you lose most of the equity.

The structure pushes people to stay 4 years.