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Amazon Manager (L6) Interview Guide
A comprehensive guide to the Amazon (L6) manager interview process.
The Amazon L6 manager interview process starts with a recruiter screen, followed by 1–2 phone screens, each covering a mix of coding, system design, and Leadership Principles. Before the onsite, you'll complete a required written essay exercise. The onsite loop usually includes five interviews that mix technical and behavioral components, for a total of 6–7 interviews overall. The process typically spans 2–8 weeks depending on scheduling.
The behavioral interviews carry the heaviest weight for your L6 hire decision since Amazon really wants to see proven leadership and people management skills at this level. Your system design performance is equally critical because L6 managers need to architect solutions and guide technical decisions across their teams. The coding rounds matter too, but they're more about maintaining technical credibility rather than demonstrating deep algorithmic expertise. What really separates L6 candidates from L5 individual contributors is your ability to show concrete examples of leading people through difficult situations, making tough trade-off decisions, and driving results through others rather than just your own technical output. Amazon requires a written essay exercise before the onsite loop for L6 manager positions, and one of your interviewers will be a Bar Raiser from outside the hiring team who focuses on whether you meet Amazon's leadership standards (typically behavioral, but may also cover technical aspects).
The interview consists of 6-7 interviews (plus written exercise):
- Recruiter / Hiring Manager Screen
- 1–2 phone screens, each covering a mix of coding, system design, and Leadership Principles
- Written Essay Exercise
- Onsite (5 interviews mixing technical and behavioral components):
- Coding + Leadership Principles
- System Design + Leadership Principles
- Hiring Manager interview (primarily Leadership Principles)
- Bar Raiser interview (primarily Leadership Principles, with occasional technical discussion depending on the interviewer's background)
- Additional interview (technical or leadership focus, varies by org)
Interview Rounds
Recruiter Screen
The initial conversation kicks off your Amazon journey with either a recruiter or the hiring manager, typically lasting around 30 minutes over Zoom. This isn't a technical deep dive but rather a mutual exploration of fit and expectations. The interviewer wants to understand your background, career trajectory, and what drew you to this particular L6 manager role at Amazon.
If you're speaking with the hiring manager directly, expect them to probe a bit deeper into your management experience and past technical decisions. They might ask about a challenging project you led or how you've handled team conflicts. When it's recruiter-led, the focus stays more on logistics, timeline, and basic background verification. Either way, they'll walk through Amazon's culture and Leadership Principles at a high level.
This conversation sets the tone for everything that follows. The interviewer is gauging your communication style, enthusiasm for the role, and whether you understand what managing at Amazon actually entails. They're also looking for red flags around cultural fit or unrealistic expectations about the position's scope.
Coding Screen
Your first technical hurdle is a 60-minute coding interview conducted through CoderPad, where you'll solve one or two programming problems while thinking out loud. The interviewer presents questions that typically involve data structures and algorithms, but they're more practical than the brain teasers you might see at other companies. Think implementing an LRU cache, designing an iterator for time-indexed data, or building stateful logic that handles concurrency.
The coding bar for L6 managers is essentially the same as for L5 senior engineers - you need to solve medium-difficulty algorithm problems efficiently and write clean, correct code. However, interviewers are more interested in your problem-solving approach and code quality than your ability to memorize obscure algorithms. Poor code quality or fundamental mistakes will be a red flag even for a manager position, so don't underestimate this round.
Production readiness matters here. Your code should look like something you'd actually commit to a repository, not just pseudocode that happens to compile. The interviewer might ask how you'd test your solution or what could go wrong in a real system. This reflects the reality that L6 managers need to maintain technical credibility with their teams while also thinking about operational concerns.
System Design Screen
The system design screen ramps up the complexity with a 60-minute architectural discussion using tools like Miro or Excalidraw. You'll be asked to design something substantial, like a news feed service, e-commerce checkout system, or distributed caching layer. This round carries significant weight for L6 candidates because it directly mirrors the architectural decisions you'll make as a manager.
Start by clarifying requirements and constraints, then work through the high-level architecture before diving into specific components. The interviewer wants to see how you think about scalability, data consistency, fault tolerance, and performance trade-offs. They'll typically push you with follow-up questions like "What happens when this service goes down?" or "How does your design handle 10x traffic growth?"
What separates strong L6 candidates is their ability to consider operational aspects beyond just the technical design. How would you monitor this system? What metrics would you track? How would you handle deployments or rollbacks? These questions reflect the reality that you'll be responsible for systems your team builds and maintains.
Written Exercise
Before your onsite loop, you'll complete a written essay that's essentially standard for L6 manager positions. This reflects Amazon's writing-heavy culture and tests your ability to articulate complex situations clearly. The prompt typically asks you to write 1-2 pages about a past project or achievement, focusing on how you accomplished it and demonstrating leadership and clarity of thought.
Your essay serves as input for deeper discussion during the behavioral interviews. Interviewers will have read your submission beforehand and may ask follow-up questions based on what you wrote. This means your essay should include rich, specific examples that can withstand detailed scrutiny.
Onsite
The onsite loop consists of five interviews that mix technical and behavioral components, with most rounds incorporating Leadership Principle questions. These interviews can happen in person or via video conference, depending on your location and team preferences. The written essay exercise completed before the onsite may be referenced during your conversations.
Coding
The onsite coding round (if included) mirrors the phone screen but with slightly higher expectations around production quality and iteration speed. Note that some L6 loops may skip onsite coding if technical competence was sufficiently demonstrated in the phone screen, though it's safest to prepare for coding in both phases. When present, you'll solve programming problems using an IDE while sharing your screen, giving the interviewer insight into your actual development workflow.
Since you're interviewing for a management role, the coding bar is about maintaining technical credibility rather than demonstrating algorithmic wizardry. The interviewer wants confidence that you can still contribute technically when needed and provide meaningful code reviews for your team. Your ability to write clean, maintainable code matters more than solving problems with optimal time complexity.
Expect some back-and-forth during this session. The interviewer might ask you to extend your solution, handle additional edge cases, or optimize for a specific constraint. This interactive element tests your ability to incorporate feedback and iterate quickly, skills that translate directly to working with your future team members.
Rather than having separate "behavioral rounds," Amazon weaves Leadership Principle questions into every single onsite interview. Even your coding and system design interviews will include 30-35 minutes of behavioral questions, making LP evaluation the heaviest weighted component of your L6 hiring decision. Some interviews may be primarily LP-focused (like the hiring manager and Bar Raiser conversations), but every interviewer is assigned specific Leadership Principles to evaluate.
The conversations go deep into your management experience, asking for specific examples of how you've led teams through difficult situations, made tough trade-off decisions, and delivered results through others. Interviewers will probe extensively into your examples using the STAR method, asking follow-up questions about your specific actions, decision-making process, and what you learned. They want to understand how you handle team conflicts, coach underperforming employees, influence without authority, and drive technical decisions across multiple stakeholders.
One of your interviewers will be a Bar Raiser from outside the hiring team, someone whose job is to maintain Amazon's hiring standards across the company. This person has veto power over your hire regardless of how the technical rounds go, so every interview matters. They're specifically evaluating whether you demonstrate Amazon's leadership standards and can raise the bar for the existing team. While Bar Raisers typically focus on behavioral evaluation, they may also conduct technical rounds while still probing Leadership Principles.
You're evaluated on four main aspects that distinguish L6 from L5:
- Leadership Impact: Concrete examples of leading people through challenges and driving results through your team rather than individual contributions. L6 candidates must show they're "force multipliers" who amplify team output, not just high-performing individual contributors.
- Decision Making: How you handle ambiguous situations where "only the problem is known" (not the solution), make trade-offs with incomplete information, and own the outcomes. L6s define strategy; L5s execute defined plans.
- People Development: Your approach to coaching, feedback, performance management, and building strong team cultures. Evidence of developing other senior engineers and managing performance across larger teams.
- Strategic Thinking: Ability to see beyond immediate technical problems to consider broader business impact and long-term technical strategy. L6s influence across teams and contribute to organizational initiatives, not just their own team's deliverables.
System Design
The onsite system design goes deeper than the phone screen, often focusing on end-to-end solutions with operational complexity. You'll work through problems on a whiteboard, designing systems that need to handle real-world constraints around performance, reliability, and maintainability. The interviewer typically starts broad and then drills into specific components based on your design choices.
Topics like data partitioning, caching strategies, monitoring, and disaster recovery frequently come up. The interviewer wants to see that you can think beyond just the happy path to consider failure modes, capacity planning, and operational burden. This reflects the reality that L6 managers are responsible for the systems their teams build, not just the initial implementation.
Operational thinking distinguishes strong candidates at this level. How would you roll out your system safely? What would your alerting strategy look like? How would you handle schema migrations or service upgrades? These considerations show you understand the full lifecycle of systems development and can guide your team through complex technical decisions.
Just like with the coding round, you'll spend about 25-30 minutes on the technical design problem and another 30-35 minutes answering behavioral questions tied to Amazon's Leadership Principles.
Hiring Manager Interview
Your conversation with the hiring manager focuses heavily on Leadership Principles and management scenarios, typically spending the entire hour on behavioral questions. This is your chance to understand the team's challenges, culture, and expectations while demonstrating your leadership philosophy and management approach.
The hiring manager wants to see if you're a good fit for their specific team and org. They'll ask about your experience managing similar teams, handling difficult technical decisions, and navigating organizational challenges. Expect questions about your management style, how you prioritize competing demands, and examples of developing team members or turning around underperforming situations.
This interview is also your opportunity to ask detailed questions about the team's current state, growth plans, and the specific challenges you'd be stepping into. Strong candidates use this time to demonstrate strategic thinking about how they'd approach the role.
Bar Raiser Interview
The Bar Raiser conducts one of the most rigorous interviews in your loop, with veto power over your hire regardless of other feedback. Crucially, they're completely independent from the hiring team - a senior leader from a different organization whose sole job is to ensure you meet Amazon's leadership bar and would raise the overall quality of the company, not just fill a role.
This interview typically focuses intensely on Leadership Principles, with the Bar Raiser asking for multiple detailed examples and probing deeply into your decision-making process, outcomes, and lessons learned. They're evaluating whether you truly embody Amazon's values and can operate at the L6 level across all leadership dimensions.
While primarily behavioral, some Bar Raisers may occasionally include technical discussions or high-level design questions depending on their background, especially if they want to test specific principles like "Dive Deep" or "Think Big." The key is demonstrating consistent leadership excellence across different scenarios and showing you can raise the bar for the existing team.
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