Advice for external hire joining amazon as an SDE 2

Congrats on securing the offer to join!
Joining as L5 with 3 YOE means you will be at the very first stage of L5 bar, that means expectations will be of higher bar that what you are used to.

Still, to navigate the first few months there, be sure to look around and learn from everyone, don't be afraid to ask if you need anything, as long as you do your research as well, it will be taken negatively if you expect answers to everything and not lookup yourself and do some research before asking.

Amazon is a very big company, but teams are of sizes less than what you are used to, the challenging part is to cope with the knowledge scale, and getting used to all the tools, but your onboarding plan should be enough to get you past the first few months.

It's helpful to identify the differences between Big Tech and smaller companies:

• More people (that's why it's called BIG Tech): this results in more stakeholders and more communication burden as you work on projects. Lots of teams and leads may need to sign off on your work compared to what you're used to at a startup.
• More layers of abstraction: You need to figure out how the pieces fit together. You don't need to open up the black box, but you should still be able to get things done using APIs or tools developed by other teams (in fact, I'd argue you shouldn't open up all the black boxes when you're new, since it'll be a distraction and a huge waste of time).
• Company-specific tools: I haven't worked at Amazon, but I've heard that many tools are custom-built for the company. Obviously, you won't know how these work when you join, but you should spend lots of time getting familiar with them. These tools will allow you to become very productive.
• Information overload: In a company as large as Amazon, it's impossible to keep up with all the code getting checked in, not to mention the constant site incidents, re-orgs, and public announcements. After you join, figure out the people and channels that matter to get high-signal information to do your job effectively.

(I made a video a while back about How Working At FAANG Makes Your Life Harder)

Some next steps:

• I highly recommend going through the onboarding course, specifically the section about Onboarding Tips Within Larger Companies
• In addition, read through the details about Amazon performance reviews here.

Congrats on the new job! I highly recommend this other discussion: "Advice for someone joining big tech from a non big tech background?"