Applied online and received email back from recruiter setting up the first of 3 hour-long phone interviews. First person was a no-show. About a week later I finally had a call with another SA who grilled me on technical questions of all types and levels - operating systems, networking, storage, programming, APIs, protocols, database, query tuning, etc. Very broad and varied. Next call was with a different SA who ran thru a series of "describe a time when..." scenarios. Some were technical but most were business experience focused. About a week later I got an email from a different recruiter inviting me to one of the Amazon offices for "the Loop". They put me up in a cheap and dingy hotel 20 mins away from the office...there's leadership principle #10 - Frugality. The Loop is a gruelling 6-hour long, non-stop process of 1:1 interviews, lunch w/ hiring manager, and a group session where I had to prepare and give a technical presentation describing something I worked on previously (you will have no direction, guidelines or advice on what to present but expect it to be picked apart mercilessly by people who know nothing about you but who truly believe they are much smarter than you). The whole process is deliberately mysterious and designed to be as stressful as possible. You will not receive a single bit of feedback during the entire process - on the phone or in-person you will have zero indication of how well or how poorly you are doing. All you will receive is an email either inviting you to move further or "thanks but no thanks." You will only have a couple of mins between interviews to ask all the questions you can in order to figure out if you actually want to work there or not. I had very low expectations going into it but still put a significant amount of time and effort preparing. They really aren't interested in your decades of experience or background and potential - they just like to test you on areas that they know most people don't have skills in...like designing a highly scalable CDN system for streaming real-time video to airplanes. Most of the AWS people I met were nice but also extremely arrogant. The culture seems to instill folks with a contempt and disdain for anything that's not Amazon. It's almost like they believe the entire tech world started back in 2006 and everything before that is irrelevant. They are extremely proud of their infamous Leadership Principles and they spend a lot of time focusing on them.

Few rounds of interview, mixed with behavioral and technical questions to showcase you knowledge of building system on aws. They also asked gen ai questions on how you would create these systems