CrackingWalnuts
Checked 3 August 2026. Amazon publishes the 16 Leadership Principles and the Bar Raiser role. Round counts and timeline are commonly reported by candidates, not published. Source: amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles.
| Round | Duration | What it tests |
|---|---|---|
| Phone Screen | 60 min | Light coding plus LP probing. |
| Coding Round | 60 min | Medium problem. Approach matters more than speed. |
| System Design Deep | 90 min | Open-ended design with strategy implications. |
| Object-Oriented Design | 60 min | Class design with extensibility and scale. |
| Bar Raiser | 60 min | Deep LP probing across all 16 principles. |
| Technical Vision (Writing) | 4 to 6 hours take-home | Written technical strategy memo. |
| VP / Director Round | 45 min | Vision, leadership style, fit. |
Targeted guidance per round in this loop. Each section links to the matching track on the site. There is no shortcut list, the bar moves loop to loop, so build the pattern recognition and the stories from real practice.
Work the pattern templates until the recognition is instant. Trace one mock problem per pattern. Practice stating time and space complexity out loud before you write code.
Amazon Principal Engineer (L7) has one design round: System Design Deep (90 min): Open-ended design with strategy implications.. Bar is multi-year architectural bets and cross-org technical strategy. You should be naming specific decisions you would defend in a roomful of senior engineers. Pick problems from the track at the scale this loop tests and rehearse the structure: requirements, numbers, high-level design, data model, API, deep dive on one part, trade-offs.
Practice class design from a vague product brief. Get the class boundaries right before the methods. Talk about edge cases before they ask. Use the LLD problems as drills.
Principal bar. Multi-year bets, executive-level communication, cross-org influence, and growing Staff engineers. The behavioral rounds often outweigh technical-depth rounds in the final hiring decision at this level. Map each story to one or two of the 16 Leadership Principles.
Write a real strategy memo for a problem you understand. Edit it twice. Read your own writing back the next morning. Aim for clear prose, specific recommendations, named trade-offs.