Amazon

Amazon has a great international presence and, as such, employs a vast variety of people. As a result, one meets and interacts with people from myriad backgrounds and nationalities. One gets to travel and experience this multi-national flavour.

The company has a very rigorous attitude towards software development. There is a well-established discipline of testing and deployment. Amazonians are very particular about how every feature/upgrade affects the customer, whether internal or external.

As a hard-core technology company, it uses state-of-the-art technologies and provides various opportunities in various aspects of software engineering. The company also provides internal training if one wishes to learn some new technology.

Many teams are split into multiple sub-teams based at different geographical locations, in fact in different countries. The difference in time zones and the inability to conveniently meet face-to-face introduces delays and sometimes, miscommunication.

Since every team is mandated to support their software and almost all software is in the form of internal services, every team member has to perform on-call duties for addressing emergency bugs. This can be stressful, as an emergency bug report can come in any time during the day or night. Also, since most teams are small, the on-call rotation is quite frequent.

Every team or a group of teams should have a program/project manager who communicates within the group and with other teams. Engineers are often too candid or too technical and aren't always ready to give up responsibility.

A shared-PM would be able to iron out these difficulties in addition to co-ordinating discussions and interactions between teams in different time-zones.