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Amazon Web Services

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Great Onboarding Experience But Lots of Role Ambiguity - Business Development Manager Amazon Web Services Employee Review

4.0
Jul 7, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great onboarding: The three month onboarding experience was very helpful in understanding company culture, my organization, and the various tools I needed to learn to be successful at my job. Good compensation: pay is good but I would recommend people get familiar with levels.fyi to understand total compensation packages, pay scales, and leveling at Amazon. Diverse group: My new-hire cohort was very diverse and many had incredible backgrounds working in various fields. My team is also quite diverse and have experience in fields that were not related to the job which is a great. Room for growth & innovation: the liberty to create things and to spearhead initiatives is wonderful. You are given the room to fail but also to learn from your mistakes. Each team has metrics which they are measured against and they are very high. My advice is that if you are consistently looking for ways to innovate and improve how you do things you will be surprised how much room you are given to fail. Mentorship and mentoring: it's great that you are able to connect with just about anyone at the company. If timed and done correctly, you can meet with people who are much higher in the organization to be mentored by them or simple to get to know them. Taking the initiative to reach out while being considerate of their time will yield you some pretty cool meetings. Also, being part of such a big organization you will have people reach out to you at events, social media, in-person, etc. for career advice and mentoring. These are wonderful opportunities to impact someone's life in a positive way by helping them navigate the demands and expectations of the industry.

Cons

Revolving door culture: it can be frustrating to start working with a particular person only to find out they have left the company or are transitioning to a new role. While career development and movement is encouraged it makes it hard to maintain momentum on projects. Ambiguity: When it comes to your particular job you'll hear a lot of "I don't know", meaning there is no clear answer to a question about your role or task. This is specially true if you join a new team within a growing business. Because teams are usually small you will find that another team may have some overlapping responsibilities but it will take some time to figure out who is in charge of a particular portion of the project you're working on. Once identified the issue is quickly resolved. Benefits are OK: The benefits are nothing special. Yes you get your choice of two insurance providers but they don't always cover some basic health benefits like women's reproductive health (fertility, labour & delivery, etc.) and if they do the premiums are not always the best. Work life balance: if you let the company will take all your time. There is so much demand to get things accomplished that unless you are disciplined and consistent in getting offline your entire time will be consumed with work.

Explore other reviews about Amazon Web Services

5.0
May 11, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good culture for most teams

Cons

Not as diverse as it could be

4.0
May 12, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Operated in systems that had real scale, operational constraints, and production consequences.

Cons

Working at Amazon Web Services gave me strong exposure to distributed systems, operational ownership, and production-scale infrastructure, but there were definitely tradeoffs as well. One downside was that, like many large organizations, ownership could become fragmented. You often own a subsystem or workflow rather than an entire product end-to-end, which can limit exposure to broader architectural decision-making unless you deliberately seek it out. There was also significant process overhead. Design reviews, operational processes, dependency coordination, and organizational alignment were valuable for learning rigor, but they can slow iteration compared to smaller engineering teams. Another challenge is that large internal ecosystems can abstract away infrastructure complexity. AWS has extensive internal tooling, deployment systems, and operational platforms, which are powerful, but some of that experience does not transfer directly outside the company. I also found that operational work could dominate engineering time at points. Handling production issues, retries, integration failures, and on-call responsibilities teaches reliability engineering well, but it can reduce the amount of time spent on deeper technical exploration or greenfield development. Finally, there is the perception aspect. AWS is a strong name, but experienced interviewers know there is wide variance between teams and roles. The company name opens doors, but ultimately you still need to demonstrate technical depth, ownership, and strong engineering judgment independently of the brand.

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