35 behavioral questions asked in 95% of Amazon interviews with examples

Team / time management (positive & negative) https://youtu.be/CQG4Ui0oAmk

1. Tell me about a time when you were not able to meet a time commitment. What prevented you from meeting it? What was the outcome and what did you learn from it?

API test

2. Describe a long-term project that you managed. How did you keep everything moving along in a timely manner?

Migration service

3. Give me an example of a time when you set a goal and were able to meet or achieve it

Adaptation https://youtu.be/ys7fLcH5gpg

Message Queue

4. Tell me about a time you had to quickly adjust your work priorities to meet changing demands.

Team / decision https://youtu.be/3NExTeMnobU

5. an example when you had to push back to HQ or challenged a decision

6. Tell me about the toughest decision you've had to make in the past six months

Message queue failed

7. Tell me about a decision that you regret.

Team / leadership https://youtu.be/Tg6BVRTsuic

8. What did you do when you needed to motivate a group of individuals?

9. Tell me about a time you stepped up into a leadership role

Team / communication & negotiation https://youtu.be/UJXkaide9bU

10. Do you collaborate well?

11. Describe a situation when you negotiated with others in your organization to reach agreement.

Team / coworkers https://youtu.be/ZsxkoZdyEcw

12. We've all had to work with people that don't like us. How do you deal with someone that doesn't like you?

13. We all make mistakes we wish we could take back. Tell me about a time you wish you’d handled a situation differently with a colleague.

14. The last time you had to apologize to someone

Team / conflict https://youtu.be/Zz8iQ852YMs

15. Give me an example of a time you faced a conflict while working on a team. How did you handle that?

16. Tell me about a time when you received negative feedback from your manager. How did you respond?

Problem solving https://youtu.be/2XxCUain1IU

17. Tell me about a time when you missed an obvious solution to a problem

18. A time when you faced a problem that had multiple possible solutions

19. Tell me about a time when you came up with a new approach to a problem.

20. Describe a time when you anticipated potential problems and developed preventive measures.

21. Describe a situation in which you found a creative way to overcome an obstacle.

Strategy / data https://youtu.be/oRGKHTiM29E

22. How have you leveraged data to develop a strategy?

23. a time when you were 75% through a project, & you had to pivot strategy

24. Tell me about a time when you had to choose between technologies for a project

25. Tell me about a time you had to deal with ambiguity

Innovation https://youtu.be/774ovkE2y5I

26. What’s the most innovative new idea that you have implemented?

Ownership principle https://youtu.be/Rn3EjvukTkI

27. Describe a time when you sacrificed short term goals for long term success

28. Provide an example of when you personally demonstrate ownership.

Strength / weakness https://youtu.be/q8fK73QjmbA

29. What's your greatest strength

30. Biggest weakness

Clients https://youtu.be/OFEUzyB12rE

I get nervous when I need to speak in front of a large group. In my second year, my Advisor asked me to do a presentation in the joint retreat of our department, and I did it quite bad., I got so nervous and could not understand the questions asked. I realized that this is a big problem for me, so I kept taking English courses provided where you need to present every class. Also, I am TAing many semesters, so the situation get much better. Now I am comfortable presenting for small team, but for large group of people. I am still not sure if I can do it confidently.

31. We all deal with difficult customers from time to time. Tell me about a challenging client-facing situation and how you handled it.

32. How do you show customer obsession?

Failure https://youtu.be/eaUUeFoB9CQ

33. Tell me about a time you recovered from a difficult situation

34. Tell me about a time you failed and what you learned from it

35. Why Amazon https://youtu.be/H_KGM0i9jkA

The reason that I am interested in Amazon and especially AWS is that I think people here are tool builders. At the beginning, I like Amazon because of kindle. I like reading hardcopy books when I was a undergraduate, but the books are causing trouble when I need to move, and then I found e-readers back in China. But those ones have all kinds of shortcomings, such as the high latency.

Later I bought kindle and everything goes so smoothly. When I was working on my side projects, I used AWS EC2 and S3, and although I had quite few users, but I know I don’t need to worry even I got many users, because AWS will take care of the scalability for me. Also, I am a new graduate, I want to work hard and learn all kinds of things, and based on my reading, people are saying you can gain more skills in Amazon compared to other companies.