This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sai Chiligireddy, an engineering manager at Amazon’s Seattle office. It has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified his employment history.
I joined Amazon nearly eight years ago as a software engineer and, after five years at the company, rose to an engineering management position.
During my time at the company’s Vancouver and Seattle offices, I have conducted over 100 technical interviews. I’ve also been a hiring manager and made the final call for new hires on my team after going through the full process of phone screenings, on-site assessments, and technical rounds.
In my experience, Amazon evaluates candidates on two main areas: core technical competencies and Amazon leadership principles, a set of 16 values important to the company, such as “bias for action” and “disagree and commit.”
There are four questions I ask myself every time I’m in the room with a candidate:
1. Can I collaborate with them if they join my team?
The overarching question I always keep in mind is whether this is someone I can collaborate with. I try to gauge if someone is a good communicator — do they share their ideas clearly and justify their choices?
In technical interviews, I like when people explain why they chose a certain solution and why they think it’s a good fit for what we are solving. When the solution or approach a candidate takes is suboptimal — but they are able to justify their choice — we are OK with it.
2. Do they understand the bigger picture?
The second thing I’m looking for is someone who clearly understands why their solution fits into the overall business problem or organization.
I once interviewed a candidate who only had one year of experience but had a clear understanding of the company’s product and how their work fits into the goals of the overall organization. He was able to clearly explain what their product is used for and what business value it had.
It blew my mind and made me rethink how I view my own day-to-day tasks. I started looking at my purely technical tasks and thinking about what value my work delivers for customers.
3. Are they perfectionists?
Another value candidates I like have in common is that they don’t aim for a perfect solution right away. They focus on starting and actively improving the solution and avoiding unnecessary complexities. They’re also open to feedback and are willing to change their approach to new use cases or constraints.
I tend to be a perfectionist, and this is another value I have learned from conducting interviews.
4. Are they prepared?
Candidates that stand out to me come prepared. They’ve gone through a lot of mock interviews and have recreated an interview environment for themselves. This helps them become accustomed to the pressure of solving a problem in 30 to 45 minutes.
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It’s easy to tell when a candidate hasn’t practiced for a technical interview, whether it is writing code in a document without any auto-filling features or writing code on a board like we used to require pre-pandemic. If you haven’t touched a marker in a couple of years, it’s difficult to write on a whiteboard.
They also come prepared to talk about leadership skills. A lot of people who do well have done their homework. They prepare notes in terms of what our leadership principles are and one to two examples of how they have honed those principles in the past.
They also bring questions for the hiring manager. I love when people ask about what sort of projects we work on, what challenges we face, and what can their career journey look like once they join the company.
