Amazon Solution Architect interview questions

Applied on the website. Got an email next day from recruiting co-ordinating saying "if u r interested please send some time slots". Got scheduled with someone and they only give the first name of the interviewer lest u google or linkedin them. Asked to speak to a recruiter and not a co-ordinator to understand more bout the role. So someone from recruiting called me. Woman was very rude. Her attitude put me out so much that i almost cancelled the interview(I also did not like that it was a non-commissioned position). After that i came to glassdoor and read reviews...that put me off even more...no one but one got an offer and leadership principle BS. After some thought, I recheduled the interview and decided to give it a shot without much preparation(only one hour investment). I really liked my interviewer...he asked around 70 technical questions(from raid to databases to networking to security to memcache)....interwoven with 3-4 non-tech situational questions like describe your toughest customer etc. Interviewers take a lot of notes in between and seems to be a robotic interview process and not a very personal one. Got an email from recruiting co-ordinator the next day to schedule another phone call this type a bridge phone call with 2 people. I asked her wud it be technical or behavioural and she said exactly the same as first one. Was very busy at my dayjob so all prep i did was listen to the AWS keynote. On D day, only one person showed up on the bridge instead of two. Entire interview turned out to be behavioural and situational. The interviewer was courteous but not friendly. He asked me what AWS work had i done on AWS since my last interview a week ago. I hadnt done much(other than the keynote) so off he took notes again. He also asked me how he thought the previous round went? I said it went pretty decent(duh...it must have gone decent otherwise how am i on Round2). But obviously Mr interviewer didnt like that as it did NOT meet their Leadership principle of "Self-Critique and learn from errors". Then he was like what do u think AWS is missing? I did some Product Mgmt SAAS improvements mumbo-jumbo as i had not gone thru all the 17000+ offerings in their marketplace. He asked some other behavioural questions regarding selling which i think i did a decent job at. In the end, i like to ask interviewers during the question time(5 minutes are allocated to questions) about next steps. The way he said recruiter will get back to u - I KNEW IT that they wud most likely NOT move forward. Needed to get back to interviewer on some info he needed( non interview related chat) so emailed recruiter for his email. They said company policy not to give email (I THINK THIS IS CRAP. THEY CAN ALWAYS BLOCK ME FROM THEIR MAIL SERVER IF I SEND ABUSIVE EMAILS), so forward the message. Of course after that, no-one pinged or followed-up. I finally got curious and emailed the recruiting co-ordinator and got a nice "we are considering other canditates...will keep your resume on file....mumbo-jumbo". Lessons Learnt: -Play with the damn AWS before interviewing. They expect u to know it before u take the job(not learn during the job). -Cater your interview around their 10 leadership mumbo-jumbo. - Last but not the least, if u live in Silicon valley, work for a SILICON VALLEY company. These Seattle guys DONT EVEN GIVE AMAZON DISCOUNTS OR AMAZON PRIME MEMBERSHIP!

I applied online. They responded a few days after I submitted my resume and I scheduled the phone interview for a week later. I was sent an email confirmation with the first names of the people I would be on a call with, the call in numbers and a description of what to expect in that it would be a deep technical interview. I didn't think I'd need them, but I kept a printout of some of the questions and answers I had collected nearby for moral support. From the start of the call, I realized any documents I had on hand would be useless because we were about to jump into warp speed. Within the first minute of the call we were into the technical questions. And they came fast and furious. I'm very quick to make up my mind and answer a question, but this was fast even for me. When I took time to slow things down, I think my silence was mistaken for not knowing and my interviewer would prompt me for an answer. He had warned me that we were going to cover very broad topics and that I probably wouldn't know it all, but there wasn't much time to recover from a missed question as the next question was being presented. I asked a couple of questions, hoping to have more of a dialogue than an interrogation, but I was told we could go over my questions at the end. Despite having a broad range of knowledge, 15 years in the field and already working as an SA at another company, I left the interview humbled and exhausted. If I do get a call for in person interviews, I'm not sure that I'll take the opportunity. In my experience the interview process says a lot about the people and the company you'll be working with, and I left the experience with a bad feeling of what things would be like.