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Amazon Web Services

Part of Amazon

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Depends on the team, but also declining rapidly - Software Engineer Amazon Web Services Employee Review

3.0
Feb 12, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Many different product offerings, so there is always something interesting being developed. Don't like what you're doing? Internally transfer to another team that peaks your interest. Great internal tooling and services. Its very simple to build something new and focus on the parts you care about, rather all of the boilerplate stuff. There is a bit of tedium here and there, but generally the documentation is great. Many teams are highly distributed. Nearly everything that you do in those teams has massive customer impact and hence visibility. It feels rewarding seeing your work pay off immediately in metrics/customer experience. This also opens up many doors for promotions. Extremely talented and smart people work here. You'll learn a lot from them and they'll help advance your career.

Cons

The s-team is completely out of touch. They make short sighted decisions for temporary gain. People are frustrated with them, and their lack of transparency, sympathy, and communication. Managers are unable to do anything, all decisions made by the s-team are final. Its difficult to stay motivated in such an environment. The talent is already bleeding, and it will only get worse. WLB is highly dependent on your team. That being said, oncall tends to be awful and drives down WLB.

Explore other reviews about Amazon Web Services

5.0
Jun 8, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great team when you have a manager and full team that works well and collaborates well. Stock is great. And you know when youre doing well, the pay increase is roughly the same as everyone else.

Cons

Low perks compared to other FAANG companies and most teams have high turn over

4.0
May 12, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Operated in systems that had real scale, operational constraints, and production consequences.

Cons

Working at Amazon Web Services gave me strong exposure to distributed systems, operational ownership, and production-scale infrastructure, but there were definitely tradeoffs as well. One downside was that, like many large organizations, ownership could become fragmented. You often own a subsystem or workflow rather than an entire product end-to-end, which can limit exposure to broader architectural decision-making unless you deliberately seek it out. There was also significant process overhead. Design reviews, operational processes, dependency coordination, and organizational alignment were valuable for learning rigor, but they can slow iteration compared to smaller engineering teams. Another challenge is that large internal ecosystems can abstract away infrastructure complexity. AWS has extensive internal tooling, deployment systems, and operational platforms, which are powerful, but some of that experience does not transfer directly outside the company. I also found that operational work could dominate engineering time at points. Handling production issues, retries, integration failures, and on-call responsibilities teaches reliability engineering well, but it can reduce the amount of time spent on deeper technical exploration or greenfield development. Finally, there is the perception aspect. AWS is a strong name, but experienced interviewers know there is wide variance between teams and roles. The company name opens doors, but ultimately you still need to demonstrate technical depth, ownership, and strong engineering judgment independently of the brand.

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