Any difference in culture? AWS better work life balance?
You should ask about specific teams under regular Amazon and AWS.
Which team was that guy from who jumped from the building and tried to kill himself?
core aws has better qualified managers and senior engineers. non aws is filled with managees converted from tpms/ support engineers/consulting experience, etc.. seniors don't code much and are political.. this works because majority of non aws is about integrating lot of business logic and using aws services.. nothing to innovate.. been there for 6 years. obviously generalizing but that is what u want
AWS and the rest of Amazon is massive. Whatever generalizations you might have heard about the different groups were preconceived or extrapolated from local effects.