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Amazon Web Services

Part of Amazon

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Great while it lasted - Software Engineer Amazon Web Services Employee Review

4.0
1 Oct 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I worked on an amazing team of smart ICs, with cool problems to solve at scale. The culture encourages a strong sense of ownership. Good results are generally rewarded. I grew more as an engineer in one year here than I did in multiple years elsewhere. My immediate management chain was great. Work/life balance was prioritized despite occasionally noisy oncall shifts. Junior engineers' development was fostered. My manager was always very transparent about what metrics were being looked at for performance, and still wasn't a slave to the numbers.

Cons

Benefits are not that competitive against peers, especially time off. My team suffered from some scope issues at the higher levels (promotions beyond 6 were difficult to impossible for political reasons). As everyone surely knows, Amazon's senior leadership has top-downed an aggressive RTO policy. Sure, plenty of tech companies have implemented RTO. Amazon's leadership just did it in an incredibly deceitful, trust-destroying way. The implementation details of what they landed on at the point I left were already worse (less flexible, less room for managers to make day to day exceptions) than Amazon's peers. Obviously, by next January, they will be even worse.

Explore other reviews about Amazon Web Services

5.0
22 Jun 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Strong engineering culture, competitive pay, great learning opportunities, and excellent internal mobility across teams.

Cons

Work-life balance can be tough, on-call rotations are demanding, and the pace is fast with high expectations.

3.0
21 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Ambitious projects if you're in the right team. Typically great team-mates. Don't believe the memes, the ppl are not back stabbing jerks but are overall genuinely nice. Not constrained by budgets when building cool things. Tools while sometimes clunky are powerful.

Cons

Schizophrenic lack of focus, entire teams get split, merged and upended multiple times a quarter. Some product managers are disconnected from reality. It didn't use to be the case, the PM-Ts were previously top notch. You're pushed to vibe code everything. Established products with loyal customers are getting neglected. Newer VP level leaders don't seem to know what they are doing. Veteran OG VP level leaders are either leaving in droves or seem stressed or checked out.

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