As a Solutions Architect (SA) at Amazon Web Services, you operate at the intersection of business strategy and technical innovation. This role is far more than just "fixing" technical issues; you are the bridge between complex customer business goals and the world’s most comprehensive cloud platform. You will partner with sales teams to accelerate the adoption of AWS services, driving revenue and innovation for customers ranging from early-stage startups to Global 500 enterprises in sectors like Banking, Automotive, and Manufacturing.

In this position, you serve as a trusted advisor and customer advocate. Your primary mission is to help organizations design highly scalable, flexible, and resilient cloud architectures. Whether you are helping a financial institution migrate legacy workloads, designing a Generative AI workflow for an ISV, or optimizing an SAP environment for a manufacturing giant, your technical guidance ensures the customer's long-term success. You are also the "voice of the customer," channeling feedback directly to AWS service teams to influence the future roadmap of the platform.

This role offers a unique opportunity to build mindshare and shape the cloud strategy of major organizations. You will not only design systems but also educate the market through workshops, whitepapers, and public speaking. If you are a technologist who loves solving hard problems and enjoys seeing those solutions drive measurable business value, this is one of the most impactful roles within the cloud ecosystem.

The following questions are representative of what you might face. They are drawn from candidate experiences and the core competencies of the role. Do not memorize answers; instead, use these to practice your structure and storytelling.

Technical & Architecture

• "Explain the difference between vertical and horizontal scaling. When would you use one over the other?"
• "How would you design a secure environment for a healthcare customer who needs to be HIPAA compliant?"
• "A customer is complaining about high AWS costs. What services and strategies would you review to help them optimize?"

Preparing for an interview at Amazon Web Services requires a shift in mindset. You are not just being tested on your ability to recite technical facts; you are being evaluated on how you apply technology to solve real human and business problems, and how well you embody the Amazon Leadership Principles.

Here are the key evaluation criteria you must prepare for:

Technical Breadth and Depth You must demonstrate a strong understanding of the AWS portfolio (Compute, Storage, Networking, Database, Security, AI/ML). Interviewers expect you to know when to use specific services (e.g., DynamoDB vs. RDS, Lambda vs. Fargate) and how to architect them into a cohesive solution. While you do not need to know every single service, you must show deep expertise in core infrastructure and the ability to learn new domains quickly.

Customer Obsession and Consultative Skills AWS looks for candidates who work backward from the customer's needs. You will be evaluated on your ability to ask the right questions to uncover the root business problem, rather than jumping straight to a technical fix. You need to demonstrate that you can build trust with C-level executives and technical builders alike.

The Amazon Leadership Principles This is the specific cultural DNA of the company. Every interview round will test specific Leadership Principles (LPs), such as "Dive Deep," "Bias for Action," and "Deliver Results." You must prepare stories using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) that clearly demonstrate these principles in action.

Communication and Presentation As an SA, you will spend a significant amount of time presenting to customers. You will likely be asked to perform a technical presentation or a whiteboarding session. Interviewers are assessing your clarity, your ability to handle objections, and how well you can simplify complex technical concepts for a mixed audience.

The interview process for the Solutions Architect role at Amazon Web Services is rigorous and structured, designed to ensure a high bar for both technical capability and cultural fit. Generally, the process moves from a recruiter screen to a technical phone screen, followed by a comprehensive onsite "loop." The pace can be fast, but the depth of questioning is significant. AWS is famous for its data-driven interviewing style; expect follow-up questions that probe the specific details of your past experiences.

What makes this process distinctive is the focus on the Loop and the Bar Raiser. The Loop consists of 4–5 back-to-back interviews. One of your interviewers will be a "Bar Raiser"—an interviewer from a different team brought in to ensure you meet or exceed the company's high hiring standards. They have significant decision-making power. Additionally, for SA roles, you will almost certainly be asked to complete a technical presentation or a "mock customer meeting" scenario to test your live consultative skills.

The timeline above illustrates the typical progression from your initial application to the final offer stage. Use this to plan your preparation: the time between the Technical Screen and the Onsite Loop is your critical window for deep-diving into the Leadership Principles and practicing your system design whiteboarding.

To succeed, you must demonstrate competence across several distinct areas. Interviews at Amazon Web Services are rarely generic; they are structured to extract data points supporting specific competencies.

System Design and Cloud Architecture

This is the core technical component. You will be given a vague business problem (e.g., "Design a scalable e-commerce platform" or "How would you migrate a legacy banking app to the cloud?") and asked to architect a solution on a whiteboard or virtual equivalent.

Be ready to go over:

• The Well-Architected Framework – Understand the pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability.
• Migration Strategies – The "6 Rs" of migration (Rehost, Replatform, Repurchase, Refactor, Retire, Retain).
• Hybrid Networking – How to connect on-premise data centers to AWS (Direct Connect, VPN, Transit Gateway).
• Advanced concepts – Serverless patterns, Event-driven architecture, Disaster Recovery (RTO/RPO), and Container orchestration (EKS/ECS).

Example questions or scenarios:

• "A customer wants to move their on-premise Oracle database to the cloud but requires high availability and minimal downtime. How do you architect this?"
• "Design a highly scalable photo-sharing application that handles millions of uploads per day. Focus on storage costs and retrieval speed."
• "A client is experiencing latency issues with their global application. Walk me through how you would troubleshoot and re-architect the networking layer."

Behavioral Competency (Leadership Principles)

You cannot overprepare for this. Approximately 50% of your interview time will focus on behavioral questions based on the Amazon Leadership Principles. You need specific examples for each principle.

Be ready to go over:

• Customer Obsession – Examples of when you went above and beyond for a client.
• Deliver Results – Times you overcame obstacles to meet a deadline.
• Bias for Action – Situations where you calculated a risk and moved forward without complete data.
• Ownership – Times you stepped outside your defined role to fix a problem.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to push back on a customer request because you knew it wasn't the right long-term solution."
• "Describe a situation where a project was failing. What specific actions did you take to turn it around?"
• "Give me an example of a time you dove deep into a technical issue that others had overlooked."

Specialized Domain Knowledge

Depending on the specific team (e.g., Banking, Automotive, Startups, ISV), you may be tested on domain-specific tech.

Be ready to go over:

• Data & Analytics – Data lakes, Redshift, Glue, Kinesis.
• Security & Compliance – IAM policies, KMS, Shield, WAF, and compliance standards (PCI-DSS, HIPAA) relevant to the industry.
• DevOps & Modernization – CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation).

As a Solutions Architect, your day-to-day work is dynamic and highly collaborative. Based on the job descriptions for roles in New York, Mountain View, and Cincinnati, your responsibilities generally fall into three buckets: Customer Engagement, Solution Design, and Thought Leadership.

You will spend a significant portion of your time partnering with the sales team to drive revenue and adoption. This involves joining customer calls, listening to their technical challenges, and proposing AWS-based solutions that align with their business objectives. You are the technical credibility in the room. For an "Auto & Manufacturing" SA, this might mean discussing IoT sensors and SAP migrations; for a "Startup" SA, it might mean helping a founder pick the right database for an MVP.

Solution Design and Implementation is another major component. You will lead architectural discussions, conduct whiteboarding sessions, and help customers build proof-of-concepts (POCs). You aren't just drawing diagrams; you are ensuring the designs are resilient, cost-effective, and scalable. You act as a mentor to the customer's technical team, helping them navigate best practices.

Finally, you are expected to contribute to the wider AWS community. This includes authoring whitepapers, writing technical blog posts, creating open-source projects, and speaking at public events. You also play a role in internal mentorship, helping to hire and train new SAs. You are a builder who shares knowledge, ensuring that reusable solutions are captured and disseminated across the organization.