Amazon Software Development Engineer II reviews

Fast paced and good learning

Amazon is a fantastic place to work ... if you find the right team. However this is much more easily said than done. I was placed on a random team after a generic new grad application and the first team was horrible, tough OnCall, 0 senior engineers, rotating door of leadership and managers. At this point I was really questioning if I wanted to fully leave or not so I decided to try out another team finding a project I was more passionate about. That worked and I was able to switch to an absolutely fantastic team for around a year and a half, light OnCall burden, focus on really mentoring engineers and helping them learn, and most importantly to me an awesome project. That being said it all came to an end because more often than not if Amazon is not seeing immediate $$$ from a project, even if the specific industry its targeting is known to take a long time to trust a new product, it will shut it down so unfortunately that is what happened to my team and sadly that seems quite common here. Then they will shuffle you with no say to other teams in the organization and hope that a square peg fits a round hole. Even though getting moved around sucked, I had a great time on that team so I have to give credit where credit is due. Being on that team for a year and a half I learned so much, created great lifelong connections and was able to be promoted. So even though in my experience and through friends experiences I see there are a disproportionate amount of bad teams like I mentioned earlier, there are some diamonds in the rough where you can grow and develop yourself with great people. - Pay is great - Benefits are pretty solid but nothing crazy - Promotion process can be annoying to deal with depending on your manager but for the most part its pretty structured. This changes depending on your level and title obviously but its better than just being promoted because you are friends with your manager. - Although I made the team switching seem negative (which when its forced or away team work it is!) Its also a positive to a certain degree. As a recent grad you may be unsure of what exactly you want to do in software, Amazon is so big and mobile that you can hop around to different teams to really find what you love to do. - Great selling point for future interviews and jobs, Amazon/AWS is a well known name and most companies will chomp at the bit for AWS engineers. - When you find the right team it is a fantastic learning experience, plenty of knowledge from these great engineers. Some advice is to stay away from teams with no senior engineers SDE III or higher, SDE IIIs are fantastic for learning from and have more weight when going to bat for the team against leadership.