A very well structured and organized candidate process throughout the entire end-end experience. Very warm approach in every step which was appreciated as many top companies within the IT/Cloud/SaaS space tend to be a bit cold and sometimes even disrespectful (SAP and Oracle in particular from my experience).
The process was split up in three parts after I was contacted by the recruiter:
At first I had an initial 10-15 min intro call with my recruiter where we talked through my previous qualifications and why I was interested in leaving my current employer for AWS. The recruiter then detailed what the interview process would look like and gave me a few notes and tips on what to expect and how to best prepare. Very basic and standard interview. Expect to be asked salary expectations in this step already (my suggestion is to give a general range and not a specific number, if you're not aware of the salaries internally in AWS).
In the second step I had a 45 min call with the team manager. Similar experience/process as to the first step where we had an introduction part, went through CV/history, and then followed by some more detailed questions based on my previous roles (how do you combine research in your current sales approach, how do you work with your local field sales team, and so on). I also answered a few questions based on the leadership principles and was also given the opportunity to show my current knowledge about AWS.
For the third and final step they flew me in to their office to do a series of onsite interviews. The day lasted about 5 hours with 4 separate onsite interviews with several people across the sales organization (team director, local field sales team, peers, and so on). It was quite intense, expect to be asked about 4-8 questions based from the leadership principles in each interview as well as a brief introduction of yourself, what you know about AWS and so on.
You will be told numerous times that the leadership principles is a key part of the process, and it is. Make sure to spend more time than you think preparing for this and have a few real life examples prepared for each one (at least the major ones that are important for your role).
Depending on what role you're interviewing for expect to only need a very high-level understanding of the AWS portfolio. You will be given a lot of time to research and become a master in AWS once you are onboard and so the focus during the interviewing process is mostly catered towards how you fit in with the Amazon culture (through the principles) and not so much on the products themselves. If you're able to mention 2-3 sentences about the key solutions (EC2, S3, DynamoDB, RDS, etc.) and explain the cloud and its main benefits in an easy to understand way, you should be good to go. Obviously the more prepared you are, the better it will go.
Like mentioned in some of the previous reviews, expect to be preparing around 30-40h in total for the entire end-end interview process. It might be a bit more than for some of the other vendors in the industry but considering that the general salary packages are quite a lot higher than the market average it's worth it.
The entire process took about 4 weeks from the day that the recruiter reached out to me asking if I was interested. I got my offer the day after my onsite interviews.
