Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

The work-life balance is relatively poor--most engineers will have to carry a pager on a regular basis. Sixty hour weeks were not uncommon in my organization. I've heard Amazon referred to as a "burn and churn" unit and I tend to agree with that. If considering various opportunities within Amazon and work-life balance is a big issue I'd steer clear from the retail and payments groups. If you enjoy building software from the bottom-up you probably won't get to do a lot of this immediately. There is a lot of legacy cruft to deal with and a lot of operational overhead is incurred as a result. I would not suggest Amazon to an engineer who is passionate about working with bleeding-edge technologies as I spent most of my time building code around application frameworks that were 5-10 years old.

As owner of your product, your team will also respond to downtime, most likely with a pager rotation. Depending on your team, you might experience some micromanagement from the Senior Management, but in my experience it happened on an occasion rather than constant basis. Also, sometimes the autonomy that teams have can be detrimental to cooperation. Some times work is duplicated instead of shared properly.