An SDE II offer at Amazon London: internal transfer, three rounds

My move to Amazon's London office didn't start with a job application. It started with someone noticing my work. I hadn't been searching or refreshing job boards. I was heads-down, shipping features and trying to do the work well. Then a manager who'd seen what I built reached out directly and invited me to explore an SDE II transfer to London. That was when it hit me that the opportunity was real and I needed to take it seriously. 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 genuinely 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 ↓