Leadership Principles and Performance Reviews: How You're Actually Measured at FAANG

Hey, it’s me again!

Let's dive deep into an incredibly important aspect of working as a Network Development Engineer at a FAANG company, one that fundamentally shapes your day-to-day experience and long-term career trajectory.

For those who haven't had the chance to read the previous three articles of this series, I strongly encourage you to take a moment to review them. The insights shared there will provide essential context and a solid foundation for understanding the concepts we're about to explore in depth.

In today's comprehensive discussion, we'll be examining two fundamental concepts that are deeply interconnected in the fabric of FAANG companies, with a particular emphasis on Amazon's approach, though these principles resonate strongly throughout all major tech organizations:

👉 Leadership Principles (LPs)

👉 Performance Reviews

These aren’t just cool words or HR jargon. They are the actual currency of success inside these organizations.

When considering a move to one of these major tech companies, it's essential to hone your work approach using Leadership Principle models. This will not only enhance the quality of your deliverables but also position you for outstanding performance reviews and long-term career growth.

What Are Leadership Principles, Really?

At companies like Amazon, Leadership Principles are not just posters on the wall or onboarding materials.

They are operational doctrines that guide how decisions are made, how work is prioritized, how feedback is given, and, most importantly, how your performance is evaluated.

These principles serve as:

• A cultural backbone: shaping how teams interact and how conflicts are resolved

• A decision-making compass: helping you make calls when trade-offs arise

• A performance framework: allowing reviewers to map your work against clear behavioral expectations

Each principle has been carefully crafted and refined to exemplify a fundamental characteristic that is not only valued but considered essential in high-performance, high-autonomy environments.

These principles represent the core competencies and behaviors that differentiate successful performers, serving as both guideposts for individual growth and benchmarks for organizational excellence.

“Isn’t That a Bunch of Corporate Fluff?”

Let’s address the skepticism head-on.

I’ve heard many engineers roll their eyes when they first hear about Leadership Principles:

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

At FAANG companies, especially Amazon, your performance review will be entirely based on how well your work maps to these exact Leadership Principles.

It doesn’t matter how technically brilliant you are.

If you fail to demonstrate (and articulate) how your contributions reflect the LPs, you will not meet the bar.

And when that happens?

• You won’t get promoted.

• You may not even stay in your role long-term.

• You could be placed into a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), a formal, high-stakes remediation process that most don’t survive.

At FAANG, performance is more than just about delivery; it’s about how you deliver, and whether you embody the traits the company considers essential for long-term success.

What Happens During a Performance Review?

At Amazon and similar companies, performance reviews are conducted once per year (though feedback occurs continuously throughout the year through regular check-ins and informal discussions).

This comprehensive evaluation process involves multiple stages and perspectives, carefully examining not just what you've accomplished, but how you've achieved those results. It's a thoroughly structured, multi-layered assessment that evaluates:

• Your business impact

• The scope and complexity of your work

• Your collaboration and ownership

• Your decision-making quality

• Your alignment with Leadership Principles

You’ll submit a self-assessment, your manager will provide an evaluation, and others you've worked with will also offer peer feedback. This package is reviewed in calibration sessions, where leaders discuss and compare engineers across teams to determine:

• Are you raising the bar?

• Are you meeting the bar for your level?

• Or are you not meeting the bar?

This is where promotions, bonuses, raises, and terminations are decided.

And guess what ties the whole conversation together?

Leadership Principles.

Everything you say, everything you did, it must all be traceable back to LPs.

If you can’t clearly connect the dots, you’re already behind.

🔍 Which Leadership Principles Matter Most? My Top 4

Every Leadership Principle plays a vital role in shaping performance expectations and career growth. However, drawing from extensive firsthand experience and careful observation of successful engineers across multiple teams and organizations, four principles have consistently emerged as the most significant performance differentiators in the technical landscape.

These principles have proven particularly crucial for Network Development Engineers and other individual contributors in technical roles, serving as key indicators of both current performance and future potential.

Let’s break them down:

1. Deliver Results

This one is the anchor.

"Deliver Results" means driving initiatives through to completion, hitting measurable business outcomes, and doing so reliably. That includes:

• Meeting launch dates

• Solving problems that impact customers

• Unblocking others

• Owning postmortems and closing AIs (Action Items)

Success here is more than activity. It must represent an outcome.

At the end of the day, results are the most tangible proof of engineering value.

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