Hello! Not all teams perform assessments prior to the phone screen; some do, some don't. Our phone-screen process primarily establishes your technical competency. Each team has different criteria, so I can't give you a one-size-fits-all answer (example: my team verifies you have technical depth in Microsoft technologies). (Besides, even if I did know and I told you, that'd be cheating! 😉) I will tell you that we have senior-level resources performing these phone-screens, and they'll dig as deep as you're able to go to identify where you shine. The "in-person" (depends on the team and location as to how "virtual" it is) interviews will primarily focus on cultural fit; it's critical to us that you are able to demonstrate the Leadership Principles (be prepared to talk about all 16!). You can learn more about the LPs here: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles You may have noticed that I haven't said much about AWS-specific knowledge! While that's always a plus, we are first and foremost looking for smart people with great technical skills who are a cultural fit. The rest can be taught. I hope this helps, and good luck! More on reddit.com

This is a classic "Systems Design" interview question. There are lots of resources available to prepare for it. This question isn't testing your knowledge of AWS, it's testing your ability to plan and design a large software system around specific constraints. More on reddit.com

Not in that role, but recent AWS hire. Learn about STAR interviews, read about the leadership principles in the context of your STAR stories (and STAR is just a format for a story). The HR and phone screen calls are important. Dont try to BS what you don't know, be honest. More on reddit.com

what have you done in AWS? AWS has a free tier. Sign up. You get 700+ hours to run an instance. That's enough to run one instance all month. Don't do that. Practice orchestrating multiple instances. Practice fail-over. Practice config management like Ansible/Chef/Puppet. Practice making the root drive disposable, and only putting data on a backed-up EBS data drive. Practice creating AMIs. Find some projects in Lambda on github and practice installing, configuring and monitoring them. Use SES. Use S3 lifecycle rules. Understand IAM roles. Stop using the Console - You should use the AWS CLI for everything, it's much more efficient and repeatable. Try managing some things using TerraForm. Make a website with GeoIP, CDN, where it takes markdown documents from one S3 bucket and transforms them into HTML via Lamba to another bucket. Yes, this takes time. But it won't cost more than a few bucks. More on reddit.com