I applied to Amazon numerous times before. Usually they used to turn me down with a Hackerrank or similar test, I'm not very good at those. This time I had a somewhat classic interview, starting with a recruiter calling me, followed by a technical phone screen. Both went quite well, so after weeks of delay, I was invited to an on-site round. This was the point where the awkward things started out. I was very busy that time, and also it turned out my travel documents were expired. The recruiter was pushing me aggressively to travel to London the next Friday, since they had a hiring event there that time. I just refused to go, I explained her even if I had free time for that, I had had to renew my passport anyways. I had to submit a scan of my expired passport to the recruiter to make her believe my story (yes, she explicitly asked for it). So we scheduled the interview for a week later finally. The next week I flew out to London. I asked my recruiter if I can expense the taxi or uber from and to the airport. She referred to their principle of frugality, and advised to use public transport. I was wondering what can I expect from this company at that point. Anyways I arrived to the hotel. The interview day was quite good. I had 5-6 interviews. At Amazon each interview is partly technical and partly managerial. The technical part is quite standard (whiteboard coding). The managerial part can be quite annoying after the 3rd round. Basically they test you against their so-called leadership principles, ask you to tell about certain situations you had on the job before, or decisions you made or would make. These leadership principles are some kind of religious Amazon mantra they keep repeating during the interviews, if you ask me it's a bit scary. Anyways my overall experience regarding the on-site interviews were quite good. I met really smart and competent engineers, as well as managers, so even though there were some red flags, I still considered Amazon a possibility. The next week the recruiter let me know that the feedback was very positive on my interviews and they'd like to find me a team, because the team I was originally interviewing to was already full. After some additional introductory phone calls, I picked a team working on cutting edge AI stuff in Cambridge. Everyone I spoke to in the Cambridge office was extremely nice, but still, I was worried, because the overall engineer feedback on Amazon is at least very mixed. I asked them to wait with the offer because I was also interviewing with other major companies. Their offer was reasonable, but nothing extraordinary. I decided to sign with an other top company for significantly better salary, perks, and location, but a bit less interesting project. I really loved the team at Amazon Cambridge, so I wrote the recruiter a rather long feedback explaining my decision, and suggesting to keep in touch. The most disappointing thing in the entire process was that I got absolutely no answer, farewell notes, or anything for that. I never heard back from them. These little negative things will keep me far away from Amazon anyways.