Left Amazon 11 months ago after 3.5 years as a senior SWE in AWS. People ask me about WLB constantly so I'll just write it down once.
The honest answer is: it depends on your team, your skip, and what year it is. I've seen both extremes inside the same org.
What I actually experienced:
My first 18 months were brutal. Not because anyone explicitly demanded it, but because the bar-raiser culture and constant performance calibration creates this ambient pressure where you're always proving you're a top performer. The Leadership Principles aren't just interview fodder. They're how you justify every decision in docs, in meetings, in retros. If you're not wired to write in that dialect, it's exhausting.
Years 2-3 got better after I found a manager who was actually good at running interference. That's the variable people don't talk about: Amazon is a federated culture. There's no central enforcement of "you must work 60 hours." Some teams genuinely clock out at 5. Others have a pile-up culture that nobody calls out because everyone's afraid of being rated "meets bar" instead of "exceeds."
The honest rough numbers, anecdotally:
I'd say 40% of IC engineers at the L5-L6 level work reasonable hours most of the time. Another 40% are in a sustained 50-55 hour grind, especially near review cycles (Q4 is always bad). The remaining 20% are in something that would be a medical problem if a doctor saw their calendar.
What's changed in 2025-2026:
The RTO mandate and the reorg waves have genuinely changed the vibe. Multiple former colleagues tell me morale is lower than during the 2023 layoffs. Attrition in some orgs is high, which means the people left are doing more. That's a classic downward spiral.
What I miss:
The caliber of the peer group. Smart, fast, opinionated people. The document culture (yes, really, I miss 6-pagers). The access to scale that you just don't get at a 200-person startup.
What I don't miss:
PIP culture being used as a performance management tool rather than a genuine last resort. The level inflation anxiety. The fact that getting promoted from L5 to L6 can take 3-5 years and requires a specific kind of political capital that nobody tells you about until you don't have it.
If you're evaluating an Amazon offer right now: ask the hiring manager specifically how many people on the team are rated "top tier" versus "successful" versus "improvement needed." Their answer and how they answer will tell you a lot. If they say "we don't really track that" they're either lying or not paying attention.