I've worked at Amazon a little over 6 years now. I have not found it toxic. I had the good fortune of joining Amazon working under a director who had been my manager at a previous company, so I knew what he was like going in, and when I decided to switch teams I worked for someone else I already knew from around Amazon. I think it's like joining any other company - as the team interviews you, you also want to be interviewing the people for the team you'll be joining to see if it's what you want.
Different pockets of the company have different trade-offs and incentives. The on-call burden on some teams is higher. When I've seen this happen under good management, the managers work to do different things to relieve the burden (such as spending time working on tech debt, improving test automation, and so on).
Some of the aspects of Amazon's culture that I hear criticized often come with unfair comparisons. No one likes getting paged at 1:00 AM, and that's a thing that can happen to you at Amazon. In my personal experience though, I got paged at weird hours much more often working at start-ups. Amazon at least (again, generally, in the parts of the company I've worked) has a healthy culture around continuing to improve operations, preparing people for on-call, and to address any page events so that particular reason for getting paged doesn't happen again.
(I'm just offering my own opinion, I don't speak for Amazon in any official capacity.)
Different pockets of the company have different trade-offs and incentives. The on-call burden on some teams is higher. When I've seen this happen under good management, the managers work to do different things to relieve the burden (such as spending time working on tech debt, improving test automation, and so on).
Some of the aspects of Amazon's culture that I hear criticized often come with unfair comparisons. No one likes getting paged at 1:00 AM, and that's a thing that can happen to you at Amazon. In my personal experience though, I got paged at weird hours much more often working at start-ups. Amazon at least (again, generally, in the parts of the company I've worked) has a healthy culture around continuing to improve operations, preparing people for on-call, and to address any page events so that particular reason for getting paged doesn't happen again.
(I'm just offering my own opinion, I don't speak for Amazon in any official capacity.)