Amazon Senior Software Engineer reviews

3.5

62% would recommend to a friend

(680 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

42% approve of CEO

67% positive business outlook

Senior Developer Engineer employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 680 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Senior Developer Engineer professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Senior Developer Engineer professionals compared to other employers within the Tecnologías de la información industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

680 reviews
4.0
Feb 4, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

If you are on the right team, your work will have a tangible impact on millions of people, and as an engineer, it is interesting and gratifying to work on the large scale, difficult software problems. Direction is still very much set by Jeff Bezos, but to his credit he has made a lot of bold but correct decisions in the lifetime of the company. While the startup culture has faded a bit, that does mean that you can maintain a surprisingly good work-life balance while still working on interesting things.

Cons

The culture at Amazon is notoriously frugal, and that can feel penny-wise, pound-foolish after a while. The startup culture that existed in the early days is also not as prevalent, which can make staying motivated somewhat challenging when surrounded by people of varying levels of motivation. In the technical career track, Amazon does a pretty poor job developing and enabling the growth of their employees, aside from the very early stages of an engineers career, unless the employee is inclined to move into a management track. This lack of career development can be compounded by the large operational responsibilities of many teams, which makes it difficult for engineers to find the time to interact with groups outside of their general are and explore other opportunities that could help foster career growth.

2.0
Nov 23, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good place to learn about e-commerce. Seattle is a great city, and Amazon near the core rather than stuck out in the suburbs. Great coworkers. Amazon.com looks great on a resume. You get to roll-your-own engineering much of the time.

Cons

Bad place to learn about software engineering. Amazon.com is a Rube Goldberg machine that sells books (and other stuff). Many SEs spend more time in support than development. Management quality is very uneven. Everyone else also gets to roll-their-own engineering. The dynamics of the resume system mean you are most likely to be hired by a group with high turnover.

3.0
Nov 16, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Very strong IT engineering, lots of extremely smart people, plenty to learn, interesting tech challenges. Minimal formalism, engineers often have direct contacts with their business customers. Generally, there is very little balance, practically everybody I've met in different parts of organization were true professionals.

Cons

Lack of formal testing organization. Production support is performed by developers (pager rotation), you'll often get paged in the middle of the night just to find out that something broke somewhere having nothing to do with what you are supporting and people have no clue whom to page. Engineers don't last long (many leave in 1-2 years), turnover is pretty high. Benefits are rather mediocre for a large company.

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