If you have ever wondered why landing a job at Amazon feels like running an ultramarathon, the answer lies in what the company calls the “final loop” — a grueling sequence of back-to-back interviews all packed into a single day. According to insiders who have been through it, the process consists of four to six consecutive one-on-one conversations, each lasting between 45 and 60 minutes, with barely any breathing room in between. It is the last and most intense stage of Amazon’s hiring process, and it is designed to leave no stone unturned when evaluating a candidate. Those who have experienced it from both sides of the table say the sheer scale of it can catch even well-prepared applicants completely off guard.
On Amazon’s official hiring pages, the company explains that candidates meet with multiple employees during this stage, with each interviewer assessing a different set of skills and experiences to build a complete picture of how the person would fit within the team. All candidates are evaluated against what Amazon calls its “Leadership Principles,” an internal framework of values and behavioral standards that guides decision-making at every level of the organization. Interviewers look for real, concrete examples of how candidates have applied these principles in their past roles. A typical question might sound something like: “Describe a situation where you took a risk, made a mistake, or failed. What happened, and what did you learn from it?”
One Amazon employee based in Australia, who works on the retail team and shared his experience on Reddit, confirmed that the process is as demanding as its reputation suggests. He described it as “very intense” and explained that the system is far more layered than it appears from the outside. “First there’s a 20-minute phone call with HR. Then a one-hour video call with the hiring manager. After that comes the final loop — five one-hour interviews, one-on-one, with five different people,” he wrote. He added that one of those five interviewers holds the special role of “bar raiser,” a designated evaluator whose job is to hold the line on hiring standards by scrutinizing the candidate more rigorously than the others.
The bar raiser role carries significant weight in the final decision. According to the same employee, after all the interviews are done, the panel reconvenes and each interviewer submits a recommendation — either “hire,” “strong hire,” “no hire,” or “strong no hire.” The hiring manager and the bar raiser carry the most influence in the room. Crucially, a candidate must receive a hire recommendation from all five interviewers to move forward, meaning a single strong objection can derail an otherwise successful run through the process.
Not everyone walks away from the experience feeling impressed. Another Reddit user who went through Amazon’s final loop described it as one of the most exhausting ordeals he had ever endured. “I’ve never participated in such an intense, monotonous, and boring hiring process,” he wrote. He noted that at one point his voice began to give out because he was expected to speak almost continuously for 30 to 45 minutes straight. He also said that most of his interviewers left him only ten minutes at the end for his own questions, far less time than he needed.
Emily Murray, who shared her own account on Amazon’s official website, echoed those sentiments. Although she had interviewed at other companies before, she said none compared to Amazon in terms of rigor, length, or thoroughness. “The process consisted of phone calls with a recruiter and hiring manager, followed by a five-hour final round of interviews with multiple interviewers from different parts of the company,” she noted. Murray’s advice to future candidates is to prepare specific, concrete examples from past experience, ask thoughtful questions throughout the process, tailor answers to the job description, and wherever possible, back up accomplishments with data and measurable results.
Amazon is one of the largest employers on the planet, with a global workforce that has numbered well over a million people. The company’s Leadership Principles — currently 16 in total — include tenets like “Customer Obsession,” “Bias for Action,” and “Deliver Results,” and they function as the backbone of nearly every hiring decision the company makes. The bar raiser role was introduced specifically to prevent teams from lowering their standards out of urgency or familiarity bias, ensuring that every new hire genuinely raises the average performance bar of the team they join. Amazon is well known in tech and retail circles for its data-driven, behavioral interview methodology, which draws heavily from a framework sometimes referred to as STAR — Situation, Task, Action, Result — as a way of structuring responses to experience-based questions.
If you have been through Amazon’s interview process yourself or have tips for surviving it, share your thoughts in the comments.
