Amazon Software Development Engineer II reviews

Amazon.com is a great company to work for. Features are always designed with the customer in mind. Customer trust/loyalty is high. Very short release cycles (less than one month), means that your work has an immediate impact. Many managers were SDEs at some point, so they have reasonable expectations. Easy to switch to different teams working on completely different technologies (must remain with a team for at least a year, but free to move afterwards). Opportunities to move from SDE to management.

After working as a college intern at the company I was offered a full-time position which I accepted. As a first-time job out of college I can't recommend it enough; just make sure you're on a team working on an unreleased product. An Amazon team in heads-down development mode is an amazingly productive and inventive thing. Projects are rapidly prototyped, torn down, and built anew. The build system is bar none the best I have ever used; if you need some library to do something, you just depend on it. Done. We had a senior principal engineer acting as a sort of roaming quarterback among our teams and he frequently sat in on design brainstorming sessions. He also sat ten feet away from me, so bouncing ideas off of him was frictionless and really helped me grow as a fault-tolerant systems architect. People wear many hats at Amazon and you can quickly make a name for yourself as "the X guy" if you devote yourself to being an expert in X. Plans change and you can get a golden opportunity in your lap if you're lucky. For me it was defending our system architecture against three senior principals. Get your name out there and you'll have other (potentially cooler) teams trying to headhunt you from your current one. I would recommend this strategy: stay on a project long enough to make a name for yourself in some way and then jump ship to another team. A year and a half to two years is a good periodicity for this process. The best thing about Amazon is that if you find yourself getting tired of the same old drag in your current position, you can jump ship to another team and work on something entirely new and exciting. This is not Microsoft: there is little animosity between teams and no hard feelings will be had. You can be writing servers in Java one year, virtualization modifications to the Linux kernel the next, and messaging systems in Erlang the next. Corporate culture is good. There aren't as many hokey ice-breaker or get-to-know-each-other events as in other companies. I once heard the company described as "having a good drinking culture," which certainly was true within my team. Our outings were more like pub crawls, with pool and bowling often thrown in as an afterthought as we wandered around Capitol Hill. Good times were had. The pay is pretty good too and I hear the stock ain't doing half bad, too. In summary, I wholeheartedly endorse Amazon as a first out-of-college job for people who want to learn a lot about anything. Just don't dig down too much in one team and you can rise to prominence in any area you want. Within a year I was designing and implementing key pieces of our architecture and my ideas and proposals were taken as seriously as those from people with a decade or more with the company.