Amazon Language Engineer reviews

Despite Amazon being a great company, the Language Engineering role is not all it is cracked up to be. Forget ML and state of the art NLP: leadership at Amazon has determined that Lang Engineers must author deterministic FSTs while scientists do the hard NLP. Also the tooling for Lang Eng is terrible. You will be building 1980s grammars with unforgiving tooling that will cause you great frustration. They recently changed the role guidelines to say that you need advanced degree in computational linguistics which is ironic as the ideal person for this role needs extraordinary patience with applying command line tools and about the level of linguistic knowledge that comes from having a general interest in it. Another disadvantage is there are fewer than 5 Level 6 Lang Engs in Amazon and getting promoted to that level is near impossible. There are no Principal Lang Engs and the role guideline doesn’t have a category for it. Hence many people try to transfer to other roles but authoring FSTs is very limited and not very transferable for science or SDE, so you need a supportive manager and an unburdened team to find you relevant non core projects to work on.

High mental pressure, no job security, work pressure, poor leadership management