Amazon

Disclaimer: My opinion mostly represents QA/SDET culture at Amazon.

Amazon's name looks great on a resume. Amazon is one of the very few companies that can claim such a high growth rate for over a decade. Senior leadership is among the strongest I've ever seen in any company.

You will be working with great developers, PMs, and designers. You will work on outstanding projects that will impact millions of customers and generate millions of dollars in revenue. Amazon has many great tools for developers, which you can utilize as an SDET.

"Work Hard." Yes, you will be working hard. Nearly every QA team is understaffed and hiring more QA folks. Your QA manager would probably report to the Sr. Dev manager. Read: your team priorities will be based around developers and their needs, rather than your own. The QA manager does not have much power to change that.

"Have Fun." This part was going down across the company, on average. We used to have basketball, volleyball, broomball, and dodgeball tournaments. This has stopped a long time ago.

"Make History." This has become harder for an SDET. You probably won't be given time to try out cool things in testing and will be sucked into project testing 75% of the time. Most of it would be manual. When asked about challenging opportunities (improve automation tools, write test frameworks, participate in hackathons, etc.), my colleagues and I have received advice from managers like, "I understand your desire to grow. Of course, we'll do [that] when we... [hire more testers, have more time during Q4, and other excuses]. You can always put your own 'extra' time to work on your ideas."

There are too few company-supported QA tools and frameworks. Each org reinvents the wheel with its own barely working automation, at best. The only company-wide test framework is being promoted politically.

Summary: I wouldn't recommend Amazon for true SDETs (testers who can and want to code state-of-the-art tools).

Don't make QA culture a subservient culture. Let SDETs grow as engineers.