Know what you are signing up for - Software Engineer Blue Origin Employee Review

1.0
3 Nov 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Amazing coworkers. Some of the brightest and nicest engineers anywhere. - The tech is interesting and innovative compared to how NASA does things. - Literally working on spaceships. - Pay is competitive for aerospace.

Cons

- Attrition is the worst I have seen anywhere. I was in the senior half of my team within a few months of joining which is insane. I saw several key individuals leave that were huge loses to the program. So much knowledge and context to previous engineering decisions vanishes when this happens. - In the past year majority of weeks were 60+ hours. Management does not always explicitly ask you to do this, but to actually do your job well a 40hr week is not enough. - To make the previous point worse there are no bonuses for your extra effort - annual/performance based/otherwise. - You better negotiate your job offer heavily because you are rarely promoted or given a raise after that. - A lot of your job will be a fine balancing act between burning down technical debt, some new development, and meeting absurd schedule goals you have no input on and are made at a high level without any consultation. Often with all these things at odds with another.

Explore other reviews about Blue Origin

5.0
3 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good team to work with. No complaints.

Cons

No cons at this point.

1.0
14 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Free coffee and snacks and a slice of pizza when New Glenn launched and landed. They years before Blue gave everyone a 10K bonus for the New Shepard first human flight, they have since shut the entire program down.

Cons

Too many to list. The high performers get hit the hardest. I went 8 months without out missing a day, pick up other incomplete projects. After 8 years I received zero stock options which was promised at time of hire. When I left Blue had 383 people with Director in their title and had 40 VPs. Blue even posted a picture of the Chief Engineers on their Facebook page, they had 42! I was there for 8 years and my title never changed, every year they promised a promotion but they never come. I have 2 Masters degrees my Sr Manager had an A.A in arts, once he made Sr Director he was there for 6 months and moved to Andril. The pad repairs will take a year and they will loose the FCC bandwidth which will make them obsolete.

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