Expert Approved Amazon UX Designer Interview Guide

The Amazon UX Designer interview loop typically looks like this:

• Online assessment (in some loops)
• Recruiter screen
• Phone screen 
• Interview loop:
  Portfolio review
  Functional exercise
  Behavioral interviews 
  Bar Raiser
• Debrief and decision

Before we get into the round-by-round description, you should know that Amazon structures its entire operational culture around its 16 core Leadership Principles (LPs). Each interviewer/ round in the loop will be explicitly assigned to evaluate about 2-3 of these.

Some applicants are asked to fill out an online assessment that can be of 2 types:

• Work-style assessment: Takes 10-20 minutes and asks you to choose statements that best describe your workstyle. These questions are strongly anchored to the LPs so the culture screen starts this early in the loop. 
• Work sample simulation: a mini trial by fire that takes 30-60 minutes that features practical tasks like reading charts or making LP-driven decisions.

You don’t really need to prepare in advance for this but you have to be sure to submit it before the deadline passes.

This is a 30-45 minute phone/video conversation with a recruiter or sometimes with the HM. Amazon clarifies that this is a formal interview that’ll screen and understand your basic qualifications and UX background. You might face a couple of behavioral questions that are tied to the LPs. At the end, you’ll have time for your own questions about the role/ team. 

Prepare to answer questions like:

• Tell me about yourself. Why are you applying to Amazon? 
• What is your experience with design systems? What are you currently working on day-to-day? 
• What kind of compensation are you expecting?

From this point on, the recruiter is your main POC so you should ask them which team you’re interviewing for so you know how to focus your prep.

Prepare a short answer to “tell me about yourself” that’s built around a highlight of your current role and has a segue into the opportunities at Amazon that excite you.

You’ll face 1-2 60-minute calls with the Hiring Manager or another senior leader. They’re basically the gatekeeper to the onsite interviews. The screens can be of two types:

• Behavioral screen: The HM will begin with questions about your background and your motivation for joining Amazon. The rest of the screen will be rooted in LP-focused questions to assess your culture fit. 
• Portfolio screen: Some teams that run 2 phone screens use the first for LPs and the second to examine the portfolio you submitted while applying. 

Expect questions like:

• Walk me through one of your past projects. What made your current solution the best fit for the problem? 
• What is your understanding of how cognitive knowledge works in collaboration with experience design? 
• What's the highest level of people you've presented to? 
• Have you ever had to deal with vague/no directives from product owners?

During the onsite, you’ll face the following rounds that run for 60 minutes each:

• Portfolio Review 
• Functional Exercise
• Behavioral interviews 
• Bar Raiser 

Candidates report an onsite of 5-6 rounds which hints at multiple rounds of the same topic (usually 3-4 behavioral). Your interviewers for the onsite will be UX professionals, PMs, SDMs and business partners from the team you’re applying to and from other teams. 

The portfolio review is a one-hour presentation of your past work that is given to every interviewer in your loop at once. You’ll present from the slides you’ve prepared; you won’t directly be presenting your raw portfolio. Amazon recommends that you come prepared with 3 detailed case studies that exhibit the depth and breadth of your work. 

For each case study, you should have a crisp narrative that touches upon:

• the customer problem you were trying to solve, and why you were solving it
• brief context on the product space
• your own role and contribution 
• the impact you and the project made, backed by numbers

Interviewers will be validating problem-solution fit and will pose follow up questions that usually dig for: 

• Impact and metrics. It’s incredibly important to tie your work back to the impact you had on the product or its cascading impact on the business. If a project shipped without metrics, you'll be asked what you would have tracked if you could go back.
• Your role and the extent of your contribution. 
• Research and methods including the personas, journey maps, usability testing, etc. 

Apart from questions about the case study itself, expect questions like: 

• How do you use personas in journey mapping?
• What are the differences between a proto-persona and a persona? 
• Do you have any human factors background?

If you’d like an interviewer to go through your deck and tell you exactly what to highlight for a panel that sees your work only once, schedule a portfolio review here. They’ll also help you predict the kinds of questions each interviewer on your panel is likely to ask, and show you how to answer them in a way that reflects your level and scores well.

Savanna Kreykes, Senior UX Designer at Amazon, says the most common mistake she sees in UX portfolios is "not getting to the 'why' clearly enough”. You can read the rest of her interview here.

This is a 60-minute live design session in which you’ll work through a UX-problem with the interviewer who’s playing the role of a stakeholder. Amazon says clearly that the problem won’t be a brainteaser or Amazon-related. Most candidates report working in Bluescape, a digital whiteboard where you can use a pen tool, shapes, text and sticky-notes. Your recruiter will send you the link to the tool well in advance so you can get acclimatized. 

The round unfolds in 4 stages:

• You’ll get a broad, open prompt that has little context attached to it
• You try to get to the heart of who the user is and what they need by working backwards from the prompt. When you ask the interviewer who the user is or what the business needs, you shouldn’t be surprised if they set a landmine by adding bloat to their answer. It's on you to proactively double-check or sanitize their answers. Make sure to do this negotiation out loud so you’re given credit for skills in stakeholder management. 
• Now, the interviewer will add a roadblock that’s typically new information/ constraint. This could happen at any point in the interview. A candidate said their interviewer waited until 5 minutes before the end to ask the candidate to scale a kayak rental app from one family to a group of 100 tourists.
• You’ll finally roadmap the solution and sketch the key user flows or a few critical screens. Interviewers expect lo-fi output so we suggest that you sketch a few critical elements or workflows and avoid jumping straight to visuals or wireframes.

Prepfully candidates have reported the following questions: 

• Design a bike rental system for the city of Seattle
• Design an app for pet adoption 
• Create a scheduling product for the gym I own
• Design a laundromat experience for customers who want to know when a machine will be free next 

We picked the brain of a veteran for some tips, so here’s what a Principal UX Designer at Amazon suggests you do: 

The behavioral interviews make up for half, if not more of your onsite loop. In each round, you’ll face 3-4 questions tied to the Leadership Principles with follow-ups for each. 

The questions usually start with “tell me about a time” or “give me an example of” because the rounds exist to examine your past work and understand the quality of decisions you took. 

Expect questions like:

• Give me an example of a goal you’ve had where you wish you had done better.
• When was the last time you got feedback from a teammate that changed how you work? 
• Tell me about a time you helped someone who wasn’t fitting in or was falling behind. 
• Explain how you’d create a competitive differentiator within our marketplace using data.
• Tell me about a time your team disagreed with your approach but you knew you were right. 
• What kinds of difficult conversations do you have with PMs?

In the behavioral rounds, you need to land on the right story quickly and recollect details without dragging out your story. The best way to do that is to write a story bank of 8-10 stories before the loop and practice their delivery.

Amazon suggests that you frame behavioral answers using the STAR framework. To give you a better edge, we recommend that you take the classic STAR framework and build it out into STAR+ (Situation, Task, Action, Result + the X-Factor: Learning) to structure your stories. You end each story with a personal takeaway and how it changed the way you work. This way, you’ll demonstrate intellectual humility which implicitly links to a lot of the LPs. Read more on Preparing for Amazon’s behavioral interview. 

This is an hour-long interview with a trained interviewer that’s outside your hiring team. Their role is to ensure that every new hire performs better than 50% of current employees in a similar role. 

In Memoirs of an Amazon Bar Raiser, Carlos Arguelles writes “BRs are a unique part of the Amazon culture. You lead the debrief (which includes all the interviewers in the same room debating their data points) and make the final hire/no hire decision. You have veto power over all hiring decisions (a hire cannot happen without your thumbs up.)”

Most Bar Raiser interviews are mostly behavioral and built around a deep dive/retro on one of your previous projects. They’ll ask about the extent of your contribution or ask you to defend certain decisions you made. 

Generally speaking, you should be prepared for this round to be a rigorous LP-alignment audit with some pressure-testing around your narrative. 

Read our Amazon's Bar Raiser Interview: A Comprehensive Guide to the Process for 6 tips on how to answer their questions.

Amazon grades candidates by rating specific leadership principles as either a Strength (ST), Satisfies (SA), Development Needed (DN), or No Evidence (NE). Interviewers use these ratings to then cast a final vote to hire you on a scale of Strongly Inclined > Inclined > Not Inclined > Strongly Not Inclined.

• L4: $149K
• L5: $199K
• L6: $289K
• L7: $421K

View the latest compensation for Amazon Product Designers on Levels.fyi