Amazon reviews

You learn a lot. You work in small teams where you are an owner of your software. This means that you own everything, from writing the code to testing it to deploying and managing your fleet of machines. Depending on which team you are on, you will end up working with some cool technologies. This includes Amazon Web services (S3, EC2, SQS). You will most likely end up writing large-scale distributed systems. Like I said before, you will learn a lot. Depending on the team, you will not have support engineers or QA people to help handle operational issues and testing. You have to do everything yourself. This is a good thing, in that it gets you into the startup mindset.

Amazon.com is an amazing place to learn. The decentralized, self-starter atmosphere strongly supports and encourages people who are motivated to try new things. In just months of being here, you'll end up having responsibilities that most companies wouldn't hand off from the legions of middle management for years. You're able to touch every aspect of the business, from the actual business side (TCO, business justifications, cost/benefit analysis, etc), to the deeply technical side (even all the way to choosing whatever technology, language, and platform you like). Every role has a huge amount of autonomy and responsibility. Additionally, there are no middle-management drones here. Every person I've met here is top-notch; blisteringly intelligent and an extremely valuable asset to the company. Like most companies, there are some folks who might do better in other roles... but I've been overwhelmed by just how GOOD these people are. Coming from a different company where a lot of people just "coast", this is a nice, refreshing change.