Just finished my Amazon loop last month and wanted to put something useful out here since I couldn't find anything recent before my own prep.
The role was SDE2 in Seattle, AWS team. Total of five rounds: two coding, one system design, one bar raiser, one behavioral that was basically a second bar raiser.
System design round was the most intense. They asked me to design a notification delivery system at scale, think hundreds of millions of pushes per day across mobile, email, and in-app. Interviewer wanted to dig into fan-out strategies pretty quickly. They didn't care much about the database schema upfront. They wanted me to start with the queue architecture and work outward.
Things they pushed on hard: how do you handle device token staleness, what's your retry strategy if downstream delivery fails, how do you avoid thundering herd if you're sending to a million users at the same time. I drew a lot on Kafka + SQS hybrid approaches. They seemed to like that I was explicit about tradeoffs instead of just naming tech.
Coding rounds were both medium-hard on Leetcode scale. One graph problem (shortest path variant, not just BFS), one on intervals. I didn't see a single easy problem the whole loop.
Bar raiser was purely behavioral, but hard. They went deep on a time I disagreed with a technical decision and the outcome. The follow-up questions kept drilling: what did you do next, what would you do differently, why didn't you escalate. Classic LP probing.
Comp offer came in around $195k base, RSUs around $240k total over four years. This was for a mid-cost-of-living location so Seattle numbers might be a bit higher.
Timeline: recruiter screen on March 18, loop on April 3, offer April 14. Faster than I expected honestly.
If anyone has specific questions about the SD round I'm happy to go deeper.