Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS follows Amazon's standardised hiring process: a screen, an assessment, and a loop of interviews scored against the Leadership Principles, with a Bar Raiser in the loop to keep the hiring bar consistent.

1. Application and resume review

Apply on the Amazon jobs portal, through a job portal such as Jobaaj, via employee referral or through campus placements. Recruiters and hiring managers screen for role-relevant experience, certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect or Developer, and evidence of measurable impact.

2. Recruiter screen

A 20 to 30 minute call on your background, motivation, location, compensation and notice period, with a briefing on the Leadership Principles and the interview format. Recruiters often share preparation material for the loop.

3. Online assessment

Software engineers complete a timed coding assessment with algorithmic problems and a work-style questionnaire. Cloud support and solutions architect candidates may receive a technical and situational online assessment or a written exercise instead.

4. Phone or technical screen

A 45 to 60 minute interview with an engineer or architect covering technical depth for the role plus one or two Leadership Principle questions. Architects are asked to design a solution for a customer scenario; support engineers troubleshoot a described incident.

5. The loop

Four to five back-to-back virtual or onsite interviews of 45 to 60 minutes each, with different interviewers, each owning specific Leadership Principles and technical competencies. One interviewer is a trained Bar Raiser from outside the team who has veto power over the hiring decision.

6. Debrief and offer

Interviewers submit written feedback and a hire or no-hire vote, then meet to decide. Offers include base pay, a sign-on bonus paid over the first two years and restricted stock units on a back-loaded vesting schedule.

The rounds below follow the loop for a solutions architect or cloud engineer; software engineering loops replace the architecture rounds with coding and system design, and sales roles with customer and deal scenarios.

Round 1: Online assessment

Around 90 to 120 minutes combining technical questions with a work-style and situational-judgement section that maps to the Leadership Principles.

• Software engineers: two algorithmic coding problems on arrays, graphs or dynamic programming
• Support and architect roles: networking, Linux, databases and troubleshooting scenarios
• Situational questions about prioritisation and ownership

Round 2: Technical phone screen

A 45 to 60 minute interview with an engineer or architect mixing technical depth with one Leadership Principle question.

• Explain how DNS, TCP and HTTPS work end to end
• Design a highly available three-tier web application on AWS
• Debug an EC2 instance that has become unreachable
• Tell me about a time you took ownership of a problem outside your role

Round 3: Technical deep dive

A 60 minute loop interview probing your strongest technical area and how deeply you understand systems you have built.

• Trade-offs between relational, NoSQL and object storage for a workload
• Cost optimisation and right-sizing a customer's architecture
• Security fundamentals: IAM, encryption, network segmentation

Round 4: System or solution design

A 60 minute whiteboard-style session where you design for scale, resilience and cost while explaining decisions as you would to a customer.

• Design a data pipeline for streaming analytics
• Migrate an on-premises application to the cloud with minimal downtime
• Multi-region disaster recovery and recovery objectives

Round 5: Leadership Principles with the Bar Raiser

A 60 minute behavioural interview using the STAR format, run by the Bar Raiser and a hiring manager across two sessions.

• A time you disagreed with your manager and what you did
• Your biggest failure and what you learned
• A decision you made with incomplete data
• How you handled a customer whose request you could not meet