🗣️ Behavioral & STAR Stories
STAR: Situation (2 lines) → Task (1 line) → Action (70% of the answer, use “I”, be specific) → Result (numbers + what you learned)
Story bank (fill in 8–10; each should cover several themes)
| # | Story | Themes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Exactly-once effects in a durable workflow engine | technical depth, ownership | Orbit v2 |
| 2 | Lease/fencing bug found in chaos testing | dive deep, failure → learning | Orbit v2 |
| 3 | RAG recall from 0.6 → 0.9 through error analysis | data-driven, customer obsession | Orbit v4 |
| 4 | conflict / disagreement | Work | |
| 5 | failure / mistake + learning | Work | |
| 6 | tight deadline / delivering results | Work | |
| 7 | helping a teammate / mentoring | Work | |
| 8 | customer obsession / user impact | Work | |
| 9 | learning something fast | This roadmap! | |
| 10 | Red-teaming my own agents (prompt injection) | ownership, security mindset | Orbit v4 |
Common questions
- Tell me about yourself (90 sec: present → past → why this role)
- Most challenging project? Hardest bug?
- A time you disagreed with your lead/team
- A time you failed / missed a deadline
- A time you had to make a decision with incomplete data
- Why this company?
Resources
Amazon Leadership Principles (read them all) · The Missing README ch. on working with managers · Tech Interview Handbook behavioral section