I got rejected by Amazon three times over two years before finally getting an offer on my fourth attempt. Each rejection taught me something different.

First attempt: I underestimated the LP (Leadership Principles) questions. I thought being technically strong would be enough. It wasn't. I couldn't articulate my past experiences in a structured way.

Second attempt: I over-prepared the LPs but neglected system design. Got a design question about distributed message queues and my answer was too surface-level. No depth on consistency guarantees or partition handling.

Third attempt: Actually went really well but I got a question about designing a service I'd never thought about (inventory management for Whole Foods). My capacity estimation was way off and the interviewer noticed.

Fourth attempt: By this point I'd built up a solid set of 20 behavioral stories, deep-dived 15 system design topics, and solved 300+ coding problems. I was genuinely prepared this time.

What changed? I stopped treating each attempt as pass/fail and started treating it as a learning opportunity. After each rejection I asked for feedback and used it to identify gaps.

Now I'm a SDE2 on the AWS Lambda team and loving it.

1. The 6-month cooldown period between Amazon attempts is actually a gift. Use it.
2. Record yourself answering behavioral questions. You'll cringe but you'll improve.
3. For system design, the depth of your knowledge matters more than breadth.
4. Don't be discouraged by rejections. Many successful engineers got rejected multiple times.
5. The interviewer wants you to succeed. They're not trying to trick you.