Amazon Technical Program Manager Interview Guide

The interview process for Amazon TPMs is designed to test if you can fulfill two broad sets of responsibilities.

First, the technical ones: TPMs have to ID dependencies and technical risks for the teams they manage. Second is the program part: TPMs handle scheduling, manage sprints, set milestones, and report results to leadership.

TL;DR the interview loop for an Amazon TPM looks like this:

Step 1: Recruiter screen

Step 2: Technical phone screen (sometimes two)

Step 3: Writing assessment, due 2 days before the loop

Step 4: Interview loop, four to six 45-minute interviews

• 4.1 Behavioral rounds mapped to Amazon’s Leadership Principles (LPs)
• 4.2 System design round (sometimes two)

Step 5: Bar Raiser (part of onsite either as a distinct round or part of others)

Coupang, known as the ‘Amazon of Korea’, has a similar interview process with some identical rounds, so you can check out our Coupang TPM guide as well for more questions and advice.

Expect a short and fairly standard call with the recruiter. They’re gauging if your work history and skillset matches what Amazon requires for a specific opening. 

Amazon recruiters have asked TPM candidates these questions:

• What do you want in your next role?
• Can you walk me through your background and the programs you manage right now?
• Have you had to work and coordinate with any large engineering teams or cross-functional groups? 

Amazon recruiters will also break the entire process down for you. We suggest you ask them for your interviewers’ profiles. Having a knowledge of their background could be super helpful.

In most cases your recruiter will also tell you which Amazon leadership principles (LPs) your loop will focus on. So from the 16 LPs they might cut your focus down to 5 or 7 LPs that Amazon will be focusing on. 

The technical screen will be an hour long, you’ll be interviewed by a senior Amazon leader (usually from the team you’re gunning for) who will cover behavioral/situational and technical questions. 

Behavioral questions will be in the “tell me about a time” format. Interviewers will ask about your technical skills using indirect questions. There could also be some system design ones but it won’t be a full design exercise.

Basically, they’re focusing on your past projects, and will ask about any lessons you took from them. Our senior TPM coaches who work and conduct interviews at Amazon say these technical screens are very important and they decide whether you are going forward.

TPM candidates have been asked these questions by Amazon interviewers:

• Tell me about a day in your life.
• Can you walk me through this project? I want to understand the technical details more. 
• Can you tell me about a past project that changed how you worked?
• Can you draw an architecture diagram of your last project or of different blocks involved in your last project?

When answering, keep three things in mind: 

1. Amazon expects numbers in your answers wherever applicable.
2. Amazon’s LPs are a huge factor and already being read from here.
3. Level expectations are also set here, so how you demonstrate ownership and the scope of your work really matters. 

Make sure you emphasize your ability to forge partnerships across different teams and functions. Doing so will make a stronger case that you fit the level you’re applying for.

Quick note: These technical screens might be virtual, and we suggest you turn your camera on to build rapport with the interviewer.

Next up, you have a writing assessment. Your recruiter will send over a prompt sometime after the technical screen that’s due 2 days prior to your loop.

Executive meetings at Amazon usually start with everyone sitting together and reading a 6-page memo. 

Amazon’s culture is driven by writing, and TPMs in particular spend a large chunk of their time writing. With your memo, you want to showcase how you communicate and think through decisions. Make sure you explicitly discuss your role, and the impact you had on the organization.

As Jeff Bezos said on the Lex Fridman podcast, “The author of the memo has to be very vulnerable, putting all their thoughts out there first. But that's great because it makes them really good, and you get to see their real ideas.”

Typical prompts according to Amazon are “write about the most innovative project you’ve worked on or a time when you were able to simplify the lives of customers.” 

Amazon TPM candidates have been asked to write on these prompts:

• What is the most inventive or innovative thing you have done?
• Walk through a technical decision you made that others disagreed with. How did you decide, and what happened?  
• Prepare a 2-page Program Brief for a real or fictional technical program.
• You might also be given a detailed scenario such as “design a 24/7 self-service hardware locker system across 120 global sites to handle 50,000 daily device checkouts”. You’ll then be asked 3-5 questions based on it. 

Overall, make sure your memo is tidy and flows nicely. Try to keep sentences < 30 words to avoid clutter. The memo should include an introduction that sets up the context for uninformed readers and then a detailed problem statement, along with how success will be measured. Finally, end with the action and the results. 

You should also remove any claims that seem ambiguous and replace adjectives with hard numbers. Ultimately, ask yourself if every paragraph passes the "so what" test. If you think there are any details you might not be able to frame or defend in an in-person interview, it’s safer to just cut those out. 

Here’s an example of what ‘bad’ and ‘good’ writing for Amazon looks like:

Below the bar: The existing process was manually done and took a long time for all the developers, so we built a new automated pipeline to make everything more efficient and to eliminate human errors.

Raises the bar: I reduced deployment time from 4 hours to 15 minutes by migrating 42 microservices to a CI/CD pipeline; this move saved 45 engineering hours per week and increased our release cadence from bi-weekly to daily.

Note: During the onsite, the interviewers might spend a little time discussing your writing sample. Before you submit, read each claim and ask what senior engineers would question.

The Amazon TPM onsite will feature 4 to 6 interviews, each 45 mins long, with your future team or other TPMs. Every Amazon interviewer is pre-assigned 2 or 3 LPs they have to score you on. If you’re going for a senior TPM position, basically expect Amazon to cover at least 12 out of their 16 LPs in your interview loop.

The overall rounds can vary but expect a couple of behavioral and technical/system design interview rounds. 

Note: Interviewers are also looking at your management skills. So expect program management questions folded into both the behavioral and system design rounds. These will focus on your contributions to product and program strategy.

We have some universal guidance for the onsite that we share with Amazon TPM candidates:

• Some follow-up questions could be asked super quickly and interviewers tend to move on if candidates do not answer in time. So make sure you budget your time and are ready for rapid-fire questions from time to time.
• After one round is over, write down the leadership principles that were covered and the stories you used for those, so you refrain from repeating those examples in the following rounds.
• If you’re interviewing for a senior role (L6+ for Amazon TPMs), program execution ability and technical chops are minimum expectations. Interviewers will also be evaluating you on the complexity and scale of your projects, and your ability to persuade senior leadership. If the role is in a business heavy org like AWS or Amazon Ads, you should focus on explaining the strategic context and wider business impact of your projects.
• We also recommend you use recent stories as follow-ups can even focus on minor details which can be harder to recall if you’re discussing an older project. This Amazon TPM candidate on Blind described the specific details they were asked about (what problem, what data, what was the KPI, definition of story point, etc.). They also advise people to not jump into interviewing with Amazon if they don’t have interviewing experience. You can warm up with some lower-stakes mock interviews with an Amazon TPM coach on Prepfully so you’re entirely comfortable with the follow-ups before your onsite loop.

In total, there are 16 Amazon LPs. Every Amazon interviewer needs evidence for the LPs they’ve been assigned, which they write down to bring this evidence to the debrief.

The consensus amongst our coaches who work in senior positions across Amazon is that the most important LPs for TPMs are: Ownership, Customer Obsession, Deliver Results, and Earn Trust. 

Dive Deep, Disagree and Commit, Insist on High Standards, Bias for Action and Learn and Be Curious are also quite frequently asked about.

LPs can come in pairs and they’re slightly contradictory on purpose. 

As one of our coaches who is a senior TPM at Amazon and has 21 years of experience says:

So whenever you talk about one LP, try to draw that balance in your answer and talk about the checks and balances so it’s not negating another LP.

Along with data, an important factor that you should include in your stories is the human element. 

For instance, you can talk about frustrated customers or struggling team-members and how you came in and helped, so your answers involve that emotional aspect.

Every Amazon interviewer will ask you a few questions mapped to their given LPs; these questions are an opportunity for you to bring up your major wins or challenges. The format is “tell me about a time” and then interviewers will tie it to some area of your work. You’re also expected to ask your questions to the interviewers about Amazon’s culture and processes. Also expect some product sense questions like “How would you improve your favorite app?”

Interviewers will be writing down and presenting the evidence you provide them for their given LPs at the end of the process to the Bar Raiser and other interviewers. So make sure your stories have enough density and structure to look good in the final debrief.

Amazon TPM candidates have reported these behavioral questions: 

• What are the most challenging obstacles you have encountered while running a program, and what did you do about them?
• Walk us through your approach to create a strategy and roadmap for your programs.
• Have you ever held back feedback you later wished you'd given?
• We want to make Prime Video feel more personal but don’t want to make changes to the UI, so what would you change?
• Discuss your experience in bringing together diverse stakeholder groups and facilitating agreement on objectives and product vision.

One of our coaches who’s currently a software development manager at Amazon, and has been a senior TPM there as well, advises candidates to think and use the terms ‘one-way door’ and ‘two-way door’ as it's common terminology at Amazon. 

Amazon tells TPM candidates to expect at least one software systems design question, which is scored on the practicality, accuracy, efficiency, reliability, optimization, and scalability of the design. In actuality, for some candidates the onsite loop might even have two full system design interviews. Instead of designing a new system, you could also be asked to walk the interviewers through something you’ve worked on in the past.

In this official Amazon SDM/TPM systems design video, Rebecca Peterson, a senior SWE at Amazon, breaks down what’s expected of you, so watch it before the loop. To summarize her points, you'll be given an ambiguous customer problem. Your job is to:

1. Deconstruct it into specific technical components that will work together and solve your customer problem.
2. Make very specific technical choices and share your reasoning behind that choice.
3. Discuss the alternatives and trade-offs that you’d consider in your choices.
4. Explain how your design will produce the scaling and availability to provide a great customer experience.
5. Estimate engineering effort on behalf of the team.
6. Demonstrate how you’d create and validate system designs so the team can meet a complex road map.

Amazon TPM candidates have been asked these system design questions: 

• They might take an existing Amazon program and ask you to extend it for a new use case, for example “Can we figure out how to support live sporting events on our Prime Video platform?"
• Draw the complete process and telemetry diagram for a power generation monitoring system (this one was domain-specific to that team’s space).
• Design a large-scale distributed system from your own past experience in depth.
• Design an airline reservation system. If your customer needs to make a booking how will they search for available flights?

These questions focus on product and program strategy but the technical/system design rounds mix both:

• Walk me through the TPM product life cycle.
• Talk about how you assess the impact of emerging technologies on feature use cases.
• How do you make sure you understand the technologies behind your product?

If the interview is remote, the design will likely happen in an online diagramming tool whose link arrives before the interview. Make sure you practice in the tool to avoid fumbling around in the canvas during the interview. Follow-up questions will also include business or management issues.

One of your loop interviewers is a Bar Raiser. Amazon’s Bar Raisers are trained to interview candidates from a different organization. 

Bar Raisers make sure that candidates who get selected are at least better than 50% of Amazonians at that level and role. They’re also in charge of the debrief for all the interviewers at the end of the process.

Amazon's TPM prep page features videos from two of its Bar Raisers, Anna and Florian, sharing their interview tips; they are short and worth watching so you get the Bar Raiser's own perspective before the loop. 

They recommend you be yourself, be authentic, use level-appropriate examples, and to bring home the results of your example aka discuss the impact in detail.

What type of questions do Amazon Bar Raisers ask?

• You told [interviewer name] that you identified a big risk and prevented a production incident. Walk me through that same situation, but what if let’s say your warning was ignored and the incident happened. What would you do next? 
• Have you ever delivered a complex technical program on time and on budget, but it failed to achieve its business objective? What do you think you missed? 
• Tell me about a time you proposed a non-intuitive solution to a problem.
• There is an internal customer/consumer of your service who is not benefiting from your service improvements. How will you convince them to use your service?

Sometimes the Bar Raiser will have their own final round, although usually candidates are not told which interviewer holds that role. 

You can, however, try to spot who the Bar Raiser is; since they tend to be seasoned Amazonians and are supposed to be neutral, look for someone with deep experience, and from an unrelated department. They’ll also spend more time asking about edge cases and failure.

Now, the Bar Raiser and the hiring manager both hold decline vetoes. The Bar Raiser cannot force a hire the HM does not want. But, vetoes are rarely used and their job is usually building a consensus.

Once the onsite is done, all your interviewers submit written feedback and also make a hire/no-hire recommendation. You’ll know what the outcome is within five days. 

The decision chain is written feedback → Bar Raiser input → hiring manager decision → then offer or no offer. Strong candidates who miss on level or team fit are sometimes redirected to different teams with open headcount rather than rejected.

The salary range for TPM ranges from $155K (base is $122K) for L4 to $472K (base is $224K) at L7 according to data from Levels.fyi. Average total comp for L8 is $623K. And Amazon RSUs vest 5/15/40/40 across four years.