Of course, I guess there's no perfect isolation. A friend at Amazon set me up a video call last year with an SA at AWS (Seattle/NW) so I could inquire about working there. It sounded pretty cool but I wasn't sure. I didn't think that AWS consulting was much of a thing, since my experience client-side has been that AWS will advise but not build. Anyway, irrelevant to this thread. Not sure consulting is much better away from AWS as in my world, it's 90% dependent on the client you're with and boy have I had some awful projects.
Based on my experience working on different teams and interfacing with the SA teams (but not actually working as an SA, mind you), being an SA at AWS seems to be one of the better positions in terms of workload, limited on-call responsibilities, etc, but you do need to be very comfortable with constant customer-facing responsibilities (which can sometimes be better than on-call, and sometimes can be worse than on-call) and the team is still dragged down by the general Amazon/AWS culture.
