It will be a hard slog, and if you start at the wrong group you're in big trouble
Pros
- Cutting edge technology (at least in some groups) - Excellent tooling/infrastructure for SDEs. Good (not too burdensome) processes. - Smart engineers - Good pay and decent benefits - Stock doing well so RSUs can be worth a lot (if you join at a low point in stock price).
Cons
- Terrible oncall in almost every group. You will get very little sleep. All manner of abuse of employees is justified on the basis of Customer Obsession (employees are not treated as 'customers'). - Software quality is often sacrificed by managers to meet deadlines and blame for failures placed on engineers (so the only way for a SDE to deal with a sev-2 is to kiss that long weekend goodbye and at least show you are working on the problem). - Turnover rates in some groups are very very bad, particularly some platform teams. Managers last less than six to twelve months (these folks typically leave Amazon because you can't transfer internally before 12 months are over). If you are an SDE, forget about stability and continuity. - As AWS becomes successful, the platform teams are getting political at the manager/sr. manager levels. The organization runs on fear. You don't know when you'll get thrown under the bus. It's less of an issue at the SDE level. - Expect to beg for productivity software and decent quality laptops/computer peripherals (or buy your own). This applies across Amazon.