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Amazon AWS Senior DevOps & SRE (L6) Interview Loop Breakdown

📍 Seattle, WA · Hybrid (3 days onsite) ⏱️ 4 Weeks from Recruiter Outreach to Written Offer 💼 Role: Senior DevOps / Systems SRE (L6)

1. Loop Overview & Candidate Context

Full 5-round virtual onsite debrief for an L6 Senior DevOps role on AWS Core Infrastructure. Detailed breakdown of the Live Linux Troubleshooting round, Multi-Region Architecture, and the dreaded Bar Raiser round.

2. Detailed Round-by-Round Breakdown

Round 1: Recruiter Phone Screen & Tech Triage (45 mins)

High-level overview of candidate background, scale of past production infrastructure (node counts, RPS, SLA targets), and 3 rapid diagnostic scenario questions.

Round 2: Live Linux Internals & Systems Diagnostics (60 mins)

Shared screen on a mock Linux host experiencing network connection drops. Had to identify ephemeral port exhaustion and TIME_WAIT socket buildup using ss, netstat, and sysctl.

Round 3: High-Availability Cloud Architecture Design (60 mins)

Architect a multi-region active-active video ingestion pipeline across us-east-1 and eu-west-1 with RTO < 30 seconds and zero data loss using Route53 ARC, ALB, and Aurora Global Database.

Round 4: Production Incident Command & Post-Mortem (60 mins)

Deep dive into an actual Sev-1 incident candidate led in the past. Tested on communication under pressure, blast radius containment, and blameless post-mortem follow-through.

Round 5: The Bar Raiser & Amazon Leadership Principles (60 mins)

Probed deeply into Customer Obsession, Ownership, and Dive Deep. Asked challenging follow-up questions: 'Why did you choose that trade-off? What would you do differently with 10x scale?'

⚡ Exact Scenarios Asked & Matching Runbooks on This Hub:

The candidate encountered variations of these scenarios. Study the step-by-step diagnostic runbooks below:

3. Candidate Retrospective: What Worked & Advice

Use the STAR framework religiously for every leadership principle story. Frame your Situation with concrete metrics (RPS, MTTR, dollar impact).
Be prepared to explain the exact Linux kernel mechanisms: cgroups, namespaces, TCP handshake states, and netfilter conntrack.
Never say 'we fixed it' without clarifying your personal contribution, hypotheses, and architectural safeguards.

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