A manager who'd seen what I was building reached out directly and invited me to explore an SDE II transfer to Amazon's London office.
I hadn't been looking. Once I committed, I spent a couple of weeks preparing before the three interview rounds began. I knew Amazon's loop would lean heavily on behavioural questions tied to the leadership principles, so I didn't build a wide, shallow bank of stories. Instead I picked a small set of strong examples from my recent work and mapped each one carefully to the principles I expected most: Bias for Action, Ownership, Deliver Results. My thinking was that a few deeply rehearsed stories, told with real specificity and confidence, would land better than improvising something new under pressure every time. I made sure I could walk through each example with a tight structure: the situation, what I decided, why I decided it, and what actually shipped or changed as a result. Across the three rounds I reused those same core stories on purpose, tweaking the framing depending on what the interviewer was probing for. All three interviewers voted to hire, and I got the SDE II offer for the London role at £78,000. The on-site requirement was something I'd already factored in and was fine with.