Amazon Front End Interview Guide

Amazon’s official prep page says each interviewer typically asks two or three behavioral questions based on the Leadership Principles, and that answers should include metrics. Member reports make the stakes clear. One FEE II candidate who completed the full loop believed weaker LP answers cost them the offer. Another got a strong pass on UI coding but learned the bar raiser round and one algorithm round sank the result. A third solved the phone screen coding problem quickly and was rejected the next day, likely on the two behavioral questions.

The bar raiser is an experienced interviewer from outside the hiring team. Amazon describes the role as an objective steward of its hiring standards. In practice that means your bar raiser may not be a frontend engineer, so explain technical decisions in plain terms and make your personal impact obvious.

These are the principles members were probed on most often, with real questions from reports:

Leadership Principle	Questions members were asked
Ownership	Something you did beyond your job responsibilities; debugging an issue in another team’s code
Deliver Results	A project with a tight deadline; a serious mistake that threatened a deadline
Dive Deep	Finding the root cause of a problem; why did it become complicated (asked as a follow-up)
Bias for Action	A time you made a decision without enough data
Learn and Be Curious	A time you realized you needed to learn a new area fast
Earn Trust	Receiving critical feedback; something you persisted in but later found you were wrong about
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit	A disagreement with a teammate or manager; persuading others
Customer Obsession and Invent and Simplify	Simplifying a solution for customers; a design decision that improved load time or UX
Insist on the Highest Standards	Upholding high standards; improving a process

How to answer. Amazon recommends the STAR format (situation, task, action, result). Members who passed added three habits:

• Prepare 10 to 12 stories, not 4. Each round asks two or three LPs and interviewers coordinate to avoid repeats, so you burn through stories fast.
• Use “I” for your actions. One interviewer explicitly coached a member on separating “I” from “we.”
• Quantify the result: load time, error rate, conversion, tickets closed. Expect two or three follow-ups that dig into exactly what you did and what you would change.

“I owned the migration, so I set the rollback criteria myself: if p75 load time regressed more than 10 percent in the canary, we reverted. It regressed 4 percent, I traced it to an unbundled icon set, and we shipped a week later at 18 percent faster.”

Amazon hires frontend engineers under two job families, and the loops differ more than the titles suggest. Check which one your posting is.

Aspect	Front End Engineer (FEE)	Software Development Engineer, frontend team
Online assessment	Two vanilla JS UI tasks	Two algorithm problems, often medium to hard
Phone screen	Build a UI component; some JS trivia	LeetCode-style problems on arrays, caching, and graphs
Loop coding	Mostly UI and DOM, plus one algorithm round	Mostly algorithms, plus object-oriented design
System design	Frontend: components, state, performance, accessibility	Often backend-leaning: services, storage, load balancing
Leadership Principles	Every round	Every round

Even FEE loops include real algorithms. Members reported medium-to-hard problems on arrays, grids, heaps, and graph ordering, sometimes framed in Amazon terms. One interviewer stopped a candidate who jumped straight to the optimal solution and asked for brute force first. Start simple, then optimize.

Amazon’s FEE titles map to levels in most reports, but a few members described L5 roles as “senior,” so confirm the level with your recruiter. One recruiter told a member the main L5 difference was an added system design round and more emphasis on Leadership Principles.

Signal	FEE I (L4)	FEE II (L5)	Senior FEE (L6)
Coding	Working component with guidance	Clean, reusable component; handles edge cases unprompted	Same, plus API design for other teams’ use
System design	Usually none; some short design questions	One frontend design round	Deeper design with cross-team trade-offs
LP stories	Projects, internships, school work	Owned features with measurable results	Influenced direction across teams; handled ambiguity
Hiring manager round	Fit and learning ability	Ownership and delivery	Often a full hour of LPs

Split your time roughly evenly between UI coding and Leadership Principles stories, with algorithms and system design on top. This three-week plan assumes you already work in JavaScript daily.

Days	Focus	Practice
1 to 3	Vanilla JS components	Tabs, Accordion, Image Slider, with no framework
4 to 5	Forms and validation	Support Ticket Form, then build your own multi-field validated form from scratch
6 to 7	LP story bank	Write 10 to 12 STAR stories with metrics and map each to two principles
8 to 9	React components	Star Rating, Autocomplete, Optimistic Upvote
10 to 11	DOM and JavaScript utilities	Find By Computed Style, Event Emitter, Pretty JSON Printer
12 to 14	Algorithms	Graphs, intervals, heaps, and a topological sort; brute force first, then optimize
15 to 17	System design	Notification Center and E-Commerce Platform
18 to 21	Mock loop	Four 55-minute sessions: 25 minutes of LPs, then 30 minutes of coding, in a plain editor

Three habits matter as much as the content:

• Practice in a plain editor. No autocomplete and no running the code, to match Livecode.
• Clarify before coding. Members and interviewers both stressed agreeing on requirements first. If the interviewer answers “What do you think is reasonable?”, state an assumption and move on.
• Get a working skeleton fast. One rejected member over-engineered a dropdown layout and ran out of time. Ship the basic version, then iterate.

Work through every Amazon-tagged question in the coding questions list, review behavioral interview questions for more LP prompts, and use the study plans to schedule the rest.