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Amazon Web Services

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Good pay, but terrible work/life balance - Sr. Technical Program Manager Amazon Web Services Employee Review

1.0
Oct 22, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The salary offered was above average.

Cons

The interview process is overly time-consuming and ultimately requires sitting through at least one 4-5 hour interview loop with 5-6 different people where you are grilled on the same generic "tell me about a time when.." question over and over. Once hired, you must fully commit to a stereotypical corporate culture which includes constant doc writing and following the leadership principles like a religion to have any chance of success. You are regularly expected to respond to emails on weekends and join late night calls for non-critical items that could have been an email. It is very typical to be on the phone with people who are dialing in from their child's sporting event, a doctor appointment, while driving etc. because of this always on the clock mentality. Despite the high expectations, you only receive a meager two weeks of PTO, which is a joke is today's market and a death sentence for working here. It is widely known and discussed internally that the average lifespan of someone at AWS is only 1-2 years before they burn out and leave and it becomes immediately clear to see why as the extreme stress that is induced by leadership unsuprisingly leads to consistent backstabbing and infighting amongst teams. Overall, a job with AWS may be worthwhile as a stepping stone to something better, but be prepared to sacrifice your mental wellbeing and personal life along the way.

Explore other reviews about Amazon Web Services

5.0
May 27, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great job. I’ve learned so much it is just hard with 5 day rto

Cons

The 5 day RTO mandate

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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