An AWS Solutions Architect walked out of his Amazon onsite knowing he nailed it. Five rounds. Flawless system design. The hiring manager shook his hand and said, "We'd love to have you on the team." Two weeks later, a rejection email landed in his inbox. No feedback. No explanation.
What happened? One interviewer - the Bar Raiser - voted "Inclined Not to Hire." That single vote overruled the entire panel.
This is the most important thing to understand about Amazon's hiring process: the hiring manager does not make the final call. The Bar Raiser does. And unlike every other interviewer in your loop, the Bar Raiser is specifically trained to look for reasons to say no.
Here is the complete breakdown of how this system works, what Bar Raisers actually test, and what you need to do differently to pass the round that most candidates don't even know is happening.
What Is the Amazon Bar Raiser?
The Bar Raiser program was launched by Amazon in 1999, created by Jeff Bezos as a structural answer to a problem every fast-growing company faces: as you hire quickly, quality degrades. Managers feel pressure to fill seats. They rationalize borderline candidates. Standards slip.
The Bar Raiser is the structural fix. It is an experienced Amazon employee, always from a different team than the one you are applying to, who has undergone 6-12 months of dedicated training in Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles. Their mandate is defined precisely: ensure that every new hire is better than at least 50% of current employees doing the same role.
Three things make the Bar Raiser different from every other interviewer in your loop:
- They have no stake in filling the seat. They are not your future manager. They do not care about the team's headcount pressure or deadline. Their only job is evaluating long-term quality.
- They have veto power. An "Inclined Not to Hire" from the Bar Raiser ends your candidacy - regardless of how everyone else voted.
- They facilitate the debrief. The post-interview meeting where your fate is decided is run by the Bar Raiser, not the hiring manager.
According to Amazon's own published materials, approximately 6-12% of Amazon employees are trained Bar Raisers at any given time. So for any given interview loop, there are roughly 2-3 potential Bar Raisers who could be assigned to your interviews.
How to Identify the Bar Raiser in Your Loop
You will not be told who the Bar Raiser is. Amazon does this deliberately - they want every interviewer treated with equal authority and preparation.
That said, there are reliable signals from 200+ Amazon interview coaching sessions I have tracked:
The Bar Raiser is almost always:
- Senior (L6+ or Principal level) even if you are interviewing for an L4 or L5 role
- From a completely different department or business unit (AWS engineer interviewing for a Retail org role, for example)
- The person who asks the most aggressive follow-up questions, not accepting surface-level answers
- The interviewer who asks "why" questions after you give an answer ("Why did you make that architectural choice?")
- Someone whose title on the private calendar invite sounds oddly irrelevant to the role
In practice, the Bar Raiser is often the person who made you sweat the most. The one who asked three follow-up questions after you thought you had finished answering.
The 16 Leadership Principles the Bar Raiser Is Testing
The Bar Raiser does not evaluate your technical skills. Every other interviewer does that. The Bar Raiser evaluates your cultural and behavioral alignment to Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles (LPs).
Each interviewer in your loop is assigned 2-3 LPs to probe. The Bar Raiser is typically assigned the LPs that are hardest to fake and easiest to miss - the ones that separate "technically competent" from "actually Amazon-grade."
Here are the 4 LPs that Bar Raisers most frequently use as veto criteria, based on pattern analysis:
1. Dive Deep The "Dive Deep" principle means you stay connected to the details, audit regularly, and are skeptical when metrics contradict each other. Bar Raisers use this to detect candidates who talk at a surface level, delegate without understanding, or give credit to "the team" without being able to explain the specifics.
The veto signal: you cannot answer a second-level follow-up ("What was the actual root cause of the latency spike?"). If you say "the team investigated" instead of "I traced it to a specific line in the serialization layer," you are voting yourself No Hire.
2. Deliver Results Amazon cares about outputs, not effort. The Bar Raiser will probe whether you held yourself accountable for deadlines. Were your results quantified? Did you course-correct when things went wrong?
The veto signal: answers with no metrics. "I improved the process" without a number attached is a pattern the Bar Raiser was trained to catch.
3. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit This is the one candidates underestimate the most. Amazon wants people who push back when they think the decision is wrong, but then fully commit when the team decides. If your stories all end with "I did what I was told" or "I went along with the manager's decision," you are failing this principle.
The veto signal: zero examples of productive disagreement. Every Bar Raiser probes this. If you have not prepared a story where you pushed back on a decision - even a small one - you will not pass.
4. Ownership Ownership means you never say "that's not my job." It means you solved problems outside your explicit scope. The Bar Raiser will probe whether you flagged issues up the chain, monitored outcomes you were not responsible for, or volunteered to fix things that were "someone else's problem."
The veto signal: every story starts and ends within your exact job description.
What the Bar Raiser Interview Actually Looks Like
The Bar Raiser interview is typically one round within your final onsite loop. It lasts 45-60 minutes and is almost entirely behavioral - no coding, no system design (unless it is a combined round).
Here is the structure of a typical Bar Raiser session:
Opening (5 min): Brief introduction. The Bar Raiser will explain they are from a different team - this is your signal.
Two to three deep-dive behavioral questions (35-45 min): These are STAR-format questions, but the Bar Raiser will not let you finish a story without follow-ups. Expect 3-5 questions after each answer:
- "What was the actual technical cause?"
- "Who pushed back on your decision?"
- "What would you do differently?"
- "What happened to the results 6 months later?"
Candidate questions (5-10 min): Take this seriously. The questions you ask the Bar Raiser are also evaluated. Asking insightful, specific, data-driven questions signals Dive Deep. Asking "What does the team culture look like?" signals the opposite.
The Amazon Debrief: How Your Fate Is Actually Decided
After your loop ends, the decision does not happen immediately. Here is the exact timeline of the post-interview debrief:
Day 1-2 after onsite: Every interviewer submits their written feedback with a rating. The rating options are:
- Strong Hire
- Hire
- Inclined to Hire
- Inclined Not to Hire
- Not a Hire
Feedback submissions are due within 48 hours and are written before the debrief meeting - specifically so that no one is influenced by what other interviewers thought.
Day 3-5: The Bar Raiser schedules and runs the debrief meeting (1 hour, all interviewers plus the hiring manager attend). The Bar Raiser leads the discussion. They go through each LP that was evaluated, hear each interviewer's data points, and facilitate a structured debate on borderline cases.
The critical rule: if the Bar Raiser votes "Inclined Not to Hire" or "Not a Hire," the candidate is rejected, full stop. The hiring manager cannot overrule this. A 4-1 vote in your favor means nothing if the 1 is the Bar Raiser.
Day 5-10: Recruiter calls with the decision. Offers come via a verbal call first, followed by a written offer 3-7 days later. Rejections come via email, typically batched on Fridays.
The 5-Question Framework That Passes Bar Raiser Rounds
Bar Raisers are trained to filter out generic, polished-sounding STAR answers. They ask relentless follow-ups until they hit bedrock - a real situation with real details. The only way to survive this is to actually have bedrock.
Here is the framework I use with candidates to build Bar Raiser-proof stories:
Before the interview, for each of your 5 best career stories, you should be able to answer all of these:
The Problem Layer: What was the specific, measurable problem - not the general situation? (No "our system was slow." Yes: "Our API p99 latency was 2.3 seconds during Black Friday peak, causing $180k/hour in abandoned cart revenue.")
The Decision Layer: What were the two or three options you considered? Why did you choose the path you took? Who disagreed with you?
The Action Layer: What specifically did you do - not "we"? What tools, frameworks, commands, decisions, or conversations?
The Result Layer: What changed? By exactly how much? How do you know the change was caused by your action and not something else?
The Retrospective Layer: What would you do differently? What did you learn? Did you document it? It is this fifth layer that Bar Raisers probe for "Dive Deep" - they want to see that you did not just move on.
If you can answer all five layers for each story in under 90 seconds, you will outlast every follow-up question a Bar Raiser can throw at you.
The 8 Most Common Bar Raiser Questions in 2026
These are the questions that appear most frequently in data from Amazon interview debriefs. Every question maps to a specific LP and a specific veto risk.
| Question | LP | The Veto Risk |
|---|---|---|
| "Tell me about a time you made a decision with incomplete data." | Bias for Action | Saying you waited for complete information |
| "Describe a time you disagreed with a manager or senior colleague." | Have Backbone | Having no story, or caving immediately |
| "Tell me about a time you discovered a problem outside your scope." | Ownership | The story where you ignored it |
| "Walk me through a time your project failed to meet the deadline." | Deliver Results | Blaming external factors, no metrics |
| "Tell me about a time you simplified a complex process or system." | Invent and Simplify | Vague, no quantified improvement |
| "Describe a time you used data to make a decision others questioned." | Are Right, A Lot | No data in the story, or changing your position without rigor |
| "Tell me about the most complex technical problem you've solved." | Dive Deep | Staying at the high level, no root cause detail |
| "What is the hardest feedback you have given to someone?" | Earn Trust | Soft answers that avoided the actual conflict |
How to Pass as a Non-Engineer (Product, Operations, Sales)
The Bar Raiser program is not only for engineering roles. Program managers, product managers, operations leaders, and sales roles all go through looped interviews with Bar Raisers. The LP framework is identical. The difference is the evidence.
For non-technical roles, your stories need to quantify:
- Scope managed (how many people, dollars, or units affected)
- Process efficiencies (time savings in hours per week, error rate reductions)
- Cross-functional influence (number of teams, stakeholders, or markets impacted)
- Customer outcomes (NPS improvement, complaint rate reduction, renewal rate change)
"I managed a project across three countries to improve onboarding" is the surface level. "I redesigned the vendor onboarding workflow for 14 countries, reducing average onboarding time from 22 days to 6, which unlocked $4.2M in FY24 revenue from partners who had previously churned due to the friction" is what passes.
What Happens After the Bar Raiser Interview
Once you leave the building (or close Zoom), here is what you can and cannot control:
You cannot: know when the debrief is scheduled, influence what was already said, or contact the Bar Raiser directly.
You can:
- Send a thank-you email to your recruiter (not the Bar Raiser) within 24 hours
- Mention any key points you forgot during the interview in that email ("I wanted to add one piece of context about my answer on the deployment pipeline...")
- Prepare for a competing offer to accelerate the timeline if you have one
For timing expectations: debrief decisions happen within 5-10 days of your final loop. Offers arrive verbally within 3-7 days of the debrief decision. Written offers come 3-7 days after verbal. Total expected window: 10-21 days from onsite to written offer.
If you hit day 14 with no news, read our Amazon interview follow-up guide for the exact check-in email templates and the competing-offer script that gets Amazon to move within 48 hours.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does every Amazon interview have a Bar Raiser? Yes, for most full-time corporate and technical roles (L4 and above). Contract positions, seasonal roles, and warehouse/fulfillment roles operate on a different hiring system that does not use the formal Bar Raiser program.
Can the Bar Raiser's vote be overridden? No. Amazon's policy is explicit: if the Bar Raiser votes "Inclined Not to Hire" or "Not a Hire," the candidate is rejected. The hiring manager has no authority to overturn this decision. This is not a formality - it is enforced at the system level in Amazon's internal tools.
How long does it take to become an Amazon Bar Raiser? Bar Raiser training takes 6-12 months and involves shadowing debriefs, completing coursework on the 16 LPs, and demonstrating calibration consistency with other Bar Raisers before being certified. Only employees with a strong track record and no Performance Improvement Plans in their history are eligible to apply.
What is the Bar Raiser's pass rate? Based on community data and our coaching observations, roughly 20-25% of final-round Amazon candidates are rejected specifically by the Bar Raiser's vote. This is separate from the general loop pass rate (where 55-75% of final-round candidates are rejected).
If I fail due to the Bar Raiser, can I appeal? No. There is no appeal process for Bar Raiser decisions. You may reapply after a standard cooling-off period (typically 6-12 months for the same role family). When you reapply, Amazon's internal system flags your previous interview history.
Does Amazon tell you if the Bar Raiser was the reason you were rejected? No. Amazon's rejection emails are templated and provide no feedback. You will never know officially that the Bar Raiser vetoed you. This is intentional - it prevents candidates from arguing the decision or targeting specific interviewers.