I've finished four interview loops over the past 5 years for L6-L7 Senior Solution Architect roles in AWS. I was told I came close to being offered a role twice and held similar principal technical roles at top-shelf competitors. For 50% of the loops (2 of out 4), AWS HR ghosted me at the end, and only told me the decision after I reached several out days after they had apparently made their decision—in one case, I learned of the decision from an Amazon employee responding to my post-interview thank-you email with a "sorry it didn't go your way" message! I was astonished to learn the group's decision from an interviewer days after the fact, and not from HR - this speaks to how broken and poisonous the culture is within the recruiting team. The AWS Recruiting & HR team does not live and embody Amazon's own leadership principles that their candidates are drilled so hard through behavior interview questions. Prepping for an AWS loop takes days, often including a presentation, plus a detailed written test and psychological profile (the results of which they don't share with you). I spent an average of 16-32 hours preparing for each of my loops, and I find it both appalling (and telling of AWS culture) that HR ghosted me twice after the effort it takes to invest in their Loop process. They will provide minimal feedback for improvement at the end. Additionally, in all loops, approximately 60-75%5 of my interviewers were born in India. I feel that bias can surface if you aren’t from the right caste or giving exactly the correct rote answers. I felt I had a harder time establishing rapport with the male Indian interviewers, and I suspect I didn’t give the exactly phrased technical answers they were looking for, and didn’t get any slack cut because I'm different from them. Amazon would deny bias plays any role in their hiring decisions, but people who study bias know that we all carry biases that can implicitly cloud or distort thinking. If the majority of your interview panel share the same culture that is also different from yours, the chances of a decision being made through the lens of bias increases. Know that bias could be a plausible deniability factor in your hiring loops. AWS was a customer of mine and I spent 4 months of my life walking the halls on technical project work for the org. Some of the most toxic project experiences I've encountered and some of the worst human beings in corporate America are Amazonians. There are good people there too, but also a lot of mediocrity. The gatekeepers create an artificially high barrier to entry that is an inaccurate reflection of some of the corporate mediocrity and lackadaisical ethics you will inevitably encounter from time to time in this org. You may see their true colors reflected in the HR team, as I did.