To jobseekers from India:
- If you want to clear the interviews - Google Amazons Values and prepare your answers accordingly. However, you have been warned. Its not a nice place to work.
- You dont have any of the products that your global counterparts have. You will be handicapped by this for as long as you are in Payoneer India due to regulations.
- Unless you are desperate to get into Fin-Tech space and move on to better companies or roles, avoid joining the Sales or Partnerships team. You will quit within a year. Its the norm.
- Since 2017, of the total hires across 4 years, 70% of sales folks and 50% of partnership team have resigned. Profiles include IIM Grads, people with banking sales, ex-Amazoners etc.
- The actual hiring is a process copied from Amazon (amongst other things in India) . Roles are open for more than 3 months, and it takes a long time to hire a candidate who will then leave in a year or two (tops). IMO, most of the hires tend to be way over qualified for the actual work.
You will constantly be questioning on why the local team is following Amazon's processes. You will not receive any explanation. You have to have faith that the India team is doing it better than the others.
If you are a TL, you will spend 50% of your time in inane review meetings (Daily Standups, Weekly Review meetings and Monthly review meetings of your team and other teams). Team members will stay silent in these meetings because they fear repercussions.
Apart from this, you will also have a regional quarterly town hall where you will rehash points from the various review meetings.
You will also have quarterly meetings to evaluate and stack rank your subordinates. You are forbidden from discussing these meetings with your team. AFAIK, this practice, a relic from Bell-curve days, is also found only in the India team.
Appraisals have always been a mystery and the common guess is that its mostly based on how many talking points you generate for your manager and skip level. If you dont raise enough talking points in a year, anticipate a barebones appraisal 5-10%, or an abrupt role change.
For Promotions, its not enough to over-achieve your KPIs, you have to show that you are doing things that are at the level for which you are about to be promoted - from at least 1 year prior.
If you are in Sales - this is your JD:
Marketing will only provide you leads and they will throw a fit, if you dont convert these leads to opportunities irrespective of the quality of leads. Because their KPIs start and end there.
You might expect leads from a team whose name is Affiliates and Partnerships. However, they have independent sales targets on their own and they will be spending as much time converting leads (a la sales teams) as they are supposed to be building a lead gen machine. You will almost always get bad leads from them and you will be blamed if you dont convert them. There is a fair bit of lead stealing as well.
You will be cold calling these leads. Actually, you will be cold calling a lot (10-15 leads per day). You will feel like a Bajaj Finserv telecaller (no joke).
To compound this, the Payoneer brand is still very much unknown in the market and the actual product is so far behind what banks, Paypal and Wise have to offer. Any lead that you painstakingly nurture and get to the stage of transacting will have their user experience butchered by obsolete products or processes that were setup in Internet's infancy.
Customer Success Team will blame you for not giving them any VIP accounts while any referrals from any accounts that you do manage to give them, will be consumed by Customer Success because they need to show upsell numbers as well (Referrals are counted as upsells. Dont ask why).
Within 3 months, you will stop giving any ideas because you will be asked to deliver on them and penalized when you aren't able to.
Within 6 months, you will start reaching out to your networks for a job change and leave a review here warning others.
