Amazon Software Development Engineer II reviews

3.5

58% would recommend to a friend

(953 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

19% approve of CEO

53% positive business outlook

Software Development Engineer II employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 953 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Development Engineer II professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Development Engineer II professionals compared to other employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

953 reviews
4.0
Jun 13, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Amazon has a lot of interesting projects going on at any given time. You will likely be dealing with projects that have a scale that few other companies can compete with. This will well prepare you for your next job. If you're interested in a project that you are not working on you can still access the code and explore the development environments. This helps when starting a new project so that you can see how others have done things before. Amazon tries to hire smart people, this means that you will likely be surrounded by people that will be able to teach you something.

Cons

The biggest downside is also one of the upsides. There are so many projects being actively developed at one time that often the wheel is re-invented many times. This can makes it difficult to decide the right way to do something. There are also a ton of proprietary tools. The build system is very complex and some would say overkill for java development. That's understandable considering it was built for complex C++ linking and library managment. The deployment tool is very robust, and thus hard to understand resulting in a large learning curve for even the more senior developers. Hopefully someone on your team knows how to work the thing!

4.0
Jun 12, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1. High stock price and when most of the bonus is in stocks it makes a significant difference 2. Innovation, challenging work environment. 3. If you are geek this might be best place to work 4. Code-code-code. If you like to code this is one of the best place on earth 5. Very high hiring bar, ensures you always ends up learning from your co-workers

Cons

1. Limited career growth, organization is very flat 2. Have not completely evolved in internal processes management 3. Frustrating internal tools to get work done 4. Not much appreciation

5.0
Jun 11, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Learn the workings of a large distributed system and huge world-class website; learn technologies and software development ideas from coworkers. Good money.

Cons

The on-call load and pager duty is onerous for Software Engineers maintaining servers. Promotions are rare. There are many non-technical managers leading technical teams. Frequent re-orgs are confusing and disruptive. Java-obsession in some parts.

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Glassdoor has 250,378 Amazon reviews submitted anonymously by Amazon employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Amazon is right for you.