Cleared Amazon London SDE II — struggling with imposter syndrome. How difficult is the transition from a siloed backend role?

Hey everyone,

I recently cleared the Amazon London interviews for an SDE II role. I’m happy about the opportunity, but I’m also dealing with some imposter syndrome and anxiety about whether I’ll actually perform well after joining.

I have ~9 years of experience, mainly as a backend Java developer in a fairly siloed enterprise environment in India. My experience is mostly Java/Spring Boot, APIs and microservices. Testing, DevOps and infrastructure are handled by separate teams, so my exposure to end-to-end ownership and designing systems from scratch has been limited.

I prepared heavily for Amazon’s system-design and Leadership Principles interviews, so I’m wondering how much the interview performance translates to the actual job.

For those who have joined Amazon UK at SDE II/L5 from outside Amazon:

- Are SDE IIs expected to be highly independent from day one?
- How much ramp-up time is normally given to understand the codebase and internal systems?
- Is it realistic to learn AWS, production ownership, monitoring and system design on the job?
- How much guidance do new SDE IIs typically receive from senior engineers/tech leads?
- How quickly are you expected to own projects independently?
- Can someone strong in backend development but weaker in end-to-end ownership realistically develop those skills at Amazon?
- How common is it to struggle during the first few months?

I’d especially appreciate blunt, realistic experiences from current/former Amazon UK employees who joined at SDE II/L5 from outside Amazon.