Having a certification can help in some rare cases, but it is by no means necessary. For reference I have never taken an AWS certification exam in my life, but

Having a certification can help in some rare cases, but it is by no means necessary. For reference I have never taken an AWS certification exam in my life, but my career so far has taken me from college dropout, to working at a startup that was interested in migrating to AWS, to working as a senior developer, then a backend system architect and team lead, and finally I ended up with a position working at AWS (on the EC2 Container Service team). It's not about the credentials as much as it is about how well you can explain what you know in an interview. Any decent company would rather hire the person who is fluent and well spoken about what they know about AWS over the person who has a certification but lacks the communication skills. So the best way to get hired is to practice explaining (and whiteboard diagramming) what you know about AWS, and also detailing why what you know can be really helpful to a company's business. That will give you much more of an advantage than a certification will.