One of the best interview experiences I have had in my career - caring, intelligent and driven individuals who are willing to go deep into your career experiences to understand who you are as a leader and what types of roles you could play at the company. The interview process started with a phone screen by the executive recruiter - this person is primarily trying to understand overall cultural fit & aspirations. Then I had 2 more phone screens with operational executives at Amazon - these we deep dives into scenarios that I had encountered in my career. The most common questions seemed to follow the typical pattern of STAR questions - Situation/Task, Action you took & results I was then invited to interview in person (in Seattle). This invitation came with a request to answer one of two questions in writing - what was your greatest accomplishment and why? OR talk about a situation when you had to make a decision with very little data. I decided to answer the first. While I was doing this, I researched Amazon's culture and discovered two things - they have a very strong sense of leadership principles & they have a meeting culture that does not encourage presentation style interactions. They have a narrative based culture, where the meeting leader prepares a document with the key concepts of the meeting and provides it to the attendees. The attendees then read the document during the first 10 minutes of the meeting (or prior) and they go into rich discussions about the topic including decision making. Having read this, I decided to experiment with this and wrote a narrative on myself with a critical assessment of my skills against each of their leadership principles for the interview (treating the interview as any other amazon meeting would be treated). In a sense, this experience allowed me to anticipate many of the STAR questions that might come up including related to strengths, weaknesses, best accomplishments, biggest train wrecks etc. and put my responses down on paper. It also allowed me to immerse myself in Amazon's leadership principles and evaluate if I might/might not be a good fit. Most importantly, it conveyed my sense of transparency and openness - which then I hoped would lead to a more enriching interview experience. I submitted this 6 page narrative along with my resume and the answer to one the questions they required in writing ahead of the interview. I highly recommend doing a narrative for anyone interviewing for a leadership role at Amazon. I arrived in Seattle the night before the interview and was put up at the Fairmont - nice suite and very comfortable. The next day, I arrived at their office and was escorted by the recruiting coordinator to the interview. The interviews started at 8.30 AM and I finished at about 2.00 PM. I met about 6 people and the interview times varied from 30 to 45 minutes. The longest of these was with the hiring manager - who had taken the time to read both the narrative (with my critical evaluation against leadership principles) and my response to the greatest accomplishment in my career. What was most distinguishing about the interview process was the level of detail that everybody was willing to go into - they were not satisfied with surface level answers and went deeper and deeper to really understand your leadership style where the rubber meets the road. If you are an operations talent, you will truly enjoy this experience because you find yourself in an environment that truly values the process and is interested not just in the output but how you arrived at that output. In a nutshell, I felt at home. In addition, I asked a lot of questions about their risk taking culture (they didn't seem to have any problem making billion dollar mistakes) and the more questions I asked, the more it became obvious that despite the size of the company - their spirit of risk taking is inherent in everything they do! This is a great plus in my book. I also spent time with a person that had been at Amazon for 15 years and was responsible for their culture - he toured me around the building and told me more about their culture - which was a great experience! From a prep perspective, I did find myself repeating answers to questions during the course of the day and I highly recommend writing down different examples to common questions - so you don't have to repeat yourself and they understand the full diversity of your experience. The follow-up was as expected - prompt and to the point. Despite my desire to be at Amazon, I had to turn down the opportunity due to personal circumstances (related to relocation from Austin).