Career Advice About Amazon

I'm a support engineer in big data profile working in Amazon web services, and I'm looking to transition into a SDE role within the teams like Spark, Hadoop, Yarn EMR infrastructure, etc

At the same time I have been working hard on my promotion from L4 support engineer to L5 support engineer.

Given a scenario if I get promoted to L5 support engineer and later, down the line I also get L4 software engineer role within Amazon, should I take the SDE role at a downgraded level, should I look outside or what should be the best route?

Somebody I know has been working in Amazon BA and related positions for seven years, however they switched to SDE intern positions within Amazon. Do you think it is a wise move?

I know the general advice if one does not know is to ask their manager but sometimes an inexperienced manager might not know themself. Can anyone provide an example to make these concepts clear?

A few criteria I came up with that can be included in the framework involve

• Number of stakeholders (across how many dev teams does the project span)
• Roadmap vs. feature level ambiguity (Designing a service vs. designing an API in that service)
• Technical complexity (How many different services are talking to each other, etc)

For reference, when I talk about mid-level vs. senior-level I am referring to the leveling system across big tech (L4/L5 for Amazon, E4/E5 for Meta, etc.). Thanks!

Hey everyone!

I just passed all my Meta interviews for E4 in infra! and now I am onto team matching!
However, my recruiter wants me to try out for the monetization/ads org, but I've heard a lot of bad rumors about that org, notably that work life balance is awful and stress is really high. (Blind seems to especially dislike it haha)

Does anyone have real experience with that org here? Are the rumors true?

I don't mind a little bit of extra stress and doing some overtime from time to time as long as it's not overtaking my personal life.
For instance at Amazon (Gen AI) there were months where I was doing 80h+ per week non stop and that's the number one reason why I would like to leave tbh.

This is only the fast track option that my recruiter is offering me tho, I might still be able to get into the normal team matching pipeline afterwards too.

Anyways, thanks in advance! :)

Given all the layoffs happening all over tech industry.

This Amazon expert thinks so:

Please assist with your advice.

I joined Amazon for my first tech job as an SDE I and was able to promote to SDE II after 1 year. Fast forward to 9 months after promotion, My onboarding buddy who has been here ever since the team was founded is leaving. I ended up being the SME for one of the team's projects that makes a lot of $$$, which means a lot of eyes are on it. Although we do have a couple SDE IIIs on the team, they've been more focused on other equally important projects and don't have too much knowledge on this one. I'm starting to feel the weight of the extra responsibility as I often get pinged for escalations, have a lot more say in meetings, and invited to meetings for the roadmap of this project. There was also a recent reshuffle in the Product side and I've become their go-to guy for anything related to this project.

Having joined the industry less than 2 years ago, I kind of feel like things are really moving fast and I'm a bit overwhelmed to be honest. I was still thinking on how to increase my technical depth after promotion, and I'm not even sure if this is a good situation to be in or not. But at the same time, I do want to overcome this and perhaps turn this situation into a growth opportunity.

In my forte review, there were many comments on the expectation of me evolving into a mature leader for the team and this feels like an opportunity to work on that. I'm kind of confused on what direction to take at the moment. What would be some things I can do to make the most of this opportunity and grow my leadership skills? I feel like before all this happened, I was focusing on growing my technical skills and didn't really pay atttention much to the leadership side.

This might be a vague question, so I just wanted to see if anyone has been in this situation and have any advice on how to best navigate this or share similar experiences

I had an internship with Amazon last summer and was lucky enough to have the return internship offer for this summer. I am quite nervous because my tech stack skills are so weak. I am just good at technical interview because I do competitive programming and leetcode a lot, thats why I land my internship offer with Amz.

I forgot almost everything from my last internship. I have to admit that I was a very bad intern, not to say the worst intern. My mentor and the senior engineer of my team did the most of my last project so I got the return offer.

Please suggest me any sources to improve my tech stack skills, projects, open sources, ... so I can perform well at this summer. My team last year used Kotlin for backend codebase.

I was an SDE-3 at Amazon until last year. Lack of exciting work and fear of layoff made me switch to a late stage startup as a Sr Software Engineer.

Now I am part of a very small team (3 engineers including me) and have been working on small scale projects which won't look great on my resume. I feel like I am stuck at my level and not sure how to move ahead. If I want to level up at my current company, I might have to spend a few years. My manager just got into her role and doesn't know what growth would be like for me. When I look at staff engineers in my company, I feel I am not at their level. I have thought about making a move again but I am immediately discouraged by the thought of wasting days and months in interview preparation after doing it just last year. Feeling really lost and looking for suggestions.

Sorry if the question is too open ended or vague

I'm an incoming SDE intern and will be joining the team at the end of this month. I'm eager to get started and make the most of this opportunity. Last summer, I feel like I didn't perform up to my own expectations and left some room for improvement. I was fortunately to have a return offer but I think I don't really deserve it. This summer, I am committed to learning from my past experiences and striving to do my best. As part of my preparation, I'm planning to have a meeting with our manager to discuss my goals for this summer.

1. Are there any key topics or questions you recommend I should raise in this initial meeting?
2. How can I best communicate my summer goals to our manager?
3. Is there anything you wish you had known or asked when you first joined the team?

I came out of school wanting a traditional SWE role but ended up taking a non-SWE role with Amazon due to its name brand and strong TC. This role doesn't have too much coding, so I want to switch to the SDE track within Amazon.

I'm wondering if it makes sense to pursue avenues outside of Amazon as well. My concern is that after losing the reputation I have within Amazon, I won’t be able to get a SW2 role, getting a SW1 role instead.

I interviewed internally for SDE2 in Q1 2022, but didn’t pass the Leetcode portion. However, I was told that I was pretty close to meeting the SDE 2 bar, which is why I am optimistic about this path.

One common complaint I get from my friends to who I pitch Taro is why they should trust a company that is "Selling shovels during a gold rush".

I personally believe there is a ton of value in joining Taro but I can see their perspective since not every coaching/mentorship service has their clients' best interests in mind.

This question is more for Alex and Rahul but others are free to chime in. What is your response to this?

I've been an SDE 2 at Amazon for the past 4 years, consistently exceeding expectations. However, I'm feeling burnt out, and it seems like support for my growth is lacking. I'm contemplating taking a career break, but uncertain about the current state of the industry and whether I'll find equivalent-paying jobs upon my return. What advice can you offer?

Hi Taro. I got laid off in April from AWS. I interned at NASA JPL and I am considering going back fulltime and continuing to apply to tech companies. I don't have an offer but I am hopeful I would be able to connect with a team since I interned there one year and have 1.5 YOE at AWS. I have some concerns about joining JPL, because they are prototype and research focused.

• They don't have many production systems or serve customer traffic.
• They also operate mostly in small and independent groups so the engineering standards can differ a lot. The research group I interned at had poor engineering and code quality compared to AWS.
• The engineering environment is different than corporate. Some technologies and experiences missing at JPL that are common in tech are pipelines (CI/CD), TPS, tickets, oncall, debugging large and distributed systems, customer traffic, metrics, operational reviews.
• JPL pays poorly and has slow growth. You can be there 10 years and make less than an SDE-1 in FAANG.

I don't have any visa issues. Finances are not a problem. Currently I have very low expenses and good savings because I didn't RTO and I am living with my parents. I have 1.5 YOE at AWS and 3 years of internships before that. I see the market picking up so I am tempted to keep trying for a tech company.

Another thing to consider is that there is a lot of inertia when you join a job. I will have little time to look for other jobs in the first few months because I will be busy onboarding. I will also have less time to look for jobs and study for interviews.

Please give advice :)

Hello, I have 3 years of experience and I'm an SDE II at Amazon. The Q1 promotion results are out, and I'm surprised to see many fast-track SDE III promotions. It seems to me that when the time is right and stars align, SDE III promotion can be quick, and if you stay in one team long enough, it wouldn't be hard to get to SDE III.

80% of my team are SDE IIs, and I don't see my possibility of SDE III promotion in the next 2 years unless:

1. I find some big opportunities that bring huge revenue to the organization
2. There's a major reorg, and I'm assigned to a new team, and the new team expands
3. My current team shrinks for some reason, I stay, and my team grows again. Interestingly, my team's senior manager and 2 senior engineers actually fall into the third bucket.

What do you think? Should I just relax, keep pace, and grow my skills, hoping for a promotion by job hopping when the market recovers?

What are common limiting beliefs that you all believe software engineers have that aren't true that typically cause them to hold themselves back or causes them to not progress as quickly as they'd like?

I would assume that at each stage there are some beliefs that we have that cause us to not progress, I am currently most interested in SDE2->Senior, but would also be interested in hearing other common limiting beliefs to progress past senior as well!

Hi,

I recently joined Amazon as a boomerang after a few years here. I am on a newly-forming team that has a few SDEs without a SDM. I've been wanting to get into a SDM role and haven't seen a ton of opportunities internally for switching. I am aware of the differences between SDE and SDM since I've gone through the expectations for each role.

Here are some things I've done on helping grow teams:

• I have experience mentoring 3 junior engineers and helping them grow by taking on more initiative and becoming technically stronger.
• I have experience helping out a junior-heavy software engineering team that was also at it's early stages (I was the most experienced team member)
• I have experience cutting through ambiguity, tracking down the right people, setting up meetings and getting consensus

I just joined a few weeks ago, so I'm aware this is sudden. I'm not sure if an opportunity like this is going to happen anytime soon. I'd like to get others' perspectives if I brought this up to the interim Sr. SDM. Would it look bad if I asked to be my new team's SDM and what sort of consequences could result from this?

I was recently laid off but finding getting interviews to be quite difficult. If I cannot get a position in the next 6 months but spend that time focusing on interview prep, will employers view the gap as a red flag?

Hey folks, I recently got promoted to L5 (Mid Level). Looking for any advice in general on how should I approach my work, what to look for etc. Any words of wisdom that people would like to share?

TIA

PS: Apologies if this sounds too generic. My intention is just to learn from other people's experiences. Any advice is welcomed.

Hi all,
I entered the company as an L4 Frontend Engineer and it is my first tech job, so I started with 0 experience. Our team has a lot of frontend tasks, but also has a lot of backend work as well. As a result, I have been doing a lot of backend work when it is necessary and there isn't much difference betwee an SDE and FEE in our team in terms of the work we do.

My manager knows that I had 0 experience prior to coming here and recognizes that that I'm able to do both backend and frontend work. He mentions that I could always transition into the SDE role if I wanted to.

My question is, would there be any huge benefits of changing my role to be an SDE for my career? At this point, I wouldn't say that my skillset is more geared towards Frontend since I'm doing both and this is my first job.

My original intention was to stay a Frontend Engineer as I find frontend work more fun and it was what I studied the most for when preparing for interviews. But my friends were telling me that SDE would probably give me more opportunities in the future, so I've been thinking about this lately.

I'm about to be officially promoted to Senior Engineer in a couple of days. At the same time, I've also been been presented with an opportunity to move to a different organization in Amazon that's doing some rather exciting work. This is an opportunity I'm likely to accept.

I deeply value my current manager's support, because he was critical in helping me secure my promotion despite some very tricky circumstances. I'm aware that promotions are just meant to recognize past work, but leaving virtually immediately after a promotion still feels rather unpleasant. Leaving now will also have a bigger impact on my team since we've shrunk quite a bit recently.

What are some tips for structuring and framing the inevitable conversations I will be having with my manager(s)?