I was contacted by a recruiter, offering me to apply to a position. I applied and let her know, so I was fast-tracked to the first interview, bypassing the phone screening. This first interview was a 1.5h call with an SA, who was quite friendly and very knowledgeable. Not an easy interview, very methodic, and with interesting technical and behavioural questions. The call was long but he took a lot of time to explain me a few concepts that I was not able to elaborate well. I enjoyed the chat and it took me out of my comfort zone. Then I was informed that I made it to the last round (what they call "the loop"). This consists on 5 (!) separate interviews of at least 1h each, so you need to block an entire day. They also sent me an assignment to submit upfront. The assignment was not super difficult, but you need to put together a small infrastructure on AWS, troubleshoot it, and come up with a set of recommendations as if it would be for a real customer. On the assignment description it says that you should timebox it to 5h, but if you want to do a good job you need to invest way more time and effort. My final submission was a 16-page document (incl. screenshots and architecture diagrams). Besides, you are encouraged to be well prepared for the interview rounds, so in total I probably invested 30 to 40 hours. A recruiter followed up with me the day before "the loop," and was giving tips and the topics that were going to be discussed; these are personal experiences or "stories" and how did you apply the Amazon Leadership Principles --their mantra-- to such situations. The follow-up is helpful and something you don't see often in hiring processes, very cool. On the big day, as expected I had 5h of interviews with employees from different departments, from sales, sol. architecture, management, etc. Some of them had other employees shadowing. The interview with the upper management person was a bit weird, with very vague and repetitive questions. This gave me the feeling that this person didn't really understand the role, had no engineering background, and was only able to address the topics from a high level perspective. But the rest of the interviews had challenging questions, both technical and operational. In one of the interviews, the previously submitted assignment was also reviewed, and the feedback was good, I enjoyed discussing about the different possibilities. In the last one, I was asked to put together an architecture diagram sharing the screen, this was also a cool exercise. I was told that they would get back to me within a week. After one week had passed, nothing yet. I waited another week and wrote the recruiter asking for some feedback, but no answer either. Then I wrote the recruiting coordinator and got an automated reply, so I wrote the hiring manager, and received another automated reply (on PTO). At this point I gave up, and was no longer interested, to be honest. A few days later I got an answer from the coordinator, saying that someone else would contact me. Then I got another answer from the hiring manager, saying that yet another employee will write back. Finally, someone from HR scheduled a half an hour call (?) just to tell me that I was not selected, and to provide very vague feedback that, quite frankly, was useless. This was almost 4 weeks after the interview rounds. It was an interesting experience overall, and to be honest I wouldn't have done anything differently. I'm proud of what I presented and how I addressed most questions. However, even though the majority of the individuals I interacted with were nice, I was ghosted, and they only got back to me after many tries. I spent a considerable amount of time and energy preparing, and gave my best, to get nothing in return. I'd say this is pretty disrespectful. I would advise against applying.
