Lots of good internal tooling. When something critical to us breaks, we usually cut high severity ticket to get other team's attention.
We rarely have actual customer affecting issues in production, there's no PIP threat, promotions feel achievable within a couple years if you really want them and the extra responsibility, automation is very helpful and we're constantly looking for ways to reduce our operational load.
Yes, testing could be better. Yes, we could have more engineers. Yes, oncall could be less stressful. Yes, I spend 10+ hours on meetings every week. Yes, I write a lot of documents and do a lot if ops to debug issues. I have probably merged just 10-20 lines if code in the last couple months.
But EC2 dataplane is very complicated. Every small change needs to be given a lot of thought. Success and scale bring responsibility. Plus, I've learned so much here. I'm never bored.
And my work life balance is good overall. Slightly less than 40 serious pomodoro hours a week except when oncall.
Ec2 is a very stable system and we keep making it more stable for our customers. Do use it. It's not brittle at all. Expect occasional instance failures and design around that with cross-AZ redundancy and you should be golden.