Amazon Software Development Engineer II reviews

Fast paced dynamic environment. Smart co-workers. Strong sense of ownership in the decentralized model lends itself to designing and writing better software. Flexibility to explore alternate career paths.

Amazon is still growing, and there are a lot of great teams to work on. If you pick the right team with the right manager, there's a lot of opportunity to work on fun things like AWS or Digital Services, and get recognized and rewarded for your achievements. Some of the other highlights include: weekly tech talks to educate engineers on what's going on in the industry or to talk about a cool new technology that a team is working with, "fishbowls" - where popular authors or artists come to talk about their latest books and albums and of course, all the benefits of working in downtown (or close to it) Seattle. The dreaded pager duty that many Amazonians complain about again depends on the team you work on. On a large team, you can foresee being on pager duty once every 6-8 weeks. If your software service is critical and has a penchant for going down, this can definitely be hell. For some teams, where the service is not critical (support for internal teams, for example) or not prone to outages, pager duty can be considered a mild inconvenience.