Great pay, terrible work life balance - Software Engineer Amazon Employee Review

2.0
Feb 27, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

+ High salary + Gaining experience with AWS resources + Ability to deploy and scale cloud infrastructure without too much worry about costs + Leveraging unlimited AI tokens + Lots of amazing tooling for AI incorporated into many processes eliminating pain points + Ability to own many hats and participate in lots of product discussion + Lots of documentation + Great healthcare benefits + Cross team collaboration + Free coffee everyday + Free IT vending machine for extra basic supplies + There are processes to prevent breaking glass of data and/or followup procedures when things go awry + Because of Amazon's hiring process, you tend to work with reliable, intelligent people + Free bananas + Lots of convenient, centralized abstractions to eliminate spin up time (code, pipelines, service to service communication, etc) + Nearly unlimited resource to base off of to speed up deployment

Cons

- Low total of paid holidays - 4 year vesting strategy is mainly the incentive to stay - Terrible work/life balance to meet unrealistic deliverable deadlines for a person/team, often resulting in more hours to meet deliverable and thus setting the standard for deliverables going forward - Having to heavily document and write a majority of your own successes to prove why you deserve to be promoted - Return to office 5 days a week - With AI, the expectation to deliver has increased far beyond the expectations that people are meant to handle - Everything is prefaced with a design document or a one-pager - Decisions made by higher ups often don't get propagated down until the day of the announcement (RTO, layoffs, etc) - Great talent laid off to support business decisions despite being one of the highest net profit grossing company - No Amazon Prime, discounts at Whole Foods, or free food at the office - No semblence of employee culture as everyone is focused on deliverables and neglecting social aspect due to work culture - Not enough desks to support RTO (some conference rooms were turned into desks/bullpens)

Explore other reviews about Amazon

5.0
Apr 14, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Large company around the world

Cons

Trusted feedback by professionals teamwork

5.0
Jan 10, 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Really smart people, a lot of opportunity for growth, always encouraged to be innovative, think big, and create something new. Competitive salary and benefits with other major tech companies. 100% self motivating work environment. No dress code and 4 legged friends are welcome.

Cons

You have to be self motivated. NO ONE will hold your hand and tell you that you're doing a great job. If you need constant affirmations from management, this company isn't for you.

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