Comment by armon

I've worked at Amazon, both in the warehouse management division as well as AWS, and the whole "bar raiser" phenomenon is mostly just marketing fluff. There are a handful of engineers who don't mind interviewing (or at least hate it less than most), and they get picked often to be part of the interview circuit. After some number of interviews, you are considered one of the mystical "bar raisers". However, in my experience, they are not any different from other interviewers. More experienced sure, but the difficulty of questions is highly variable, and honestly there isn't much culture at Amazon to worry about culture fit.