Amazon

Amazon provides a lot of resources to their engineers. Between lunch and learns, endless wiki pages, office hours, and formal trainings, you'll have every resource you need to advance your career.

Compensation is great. While there aren't as many benefits as other top tech companies (you'll be paying for your lunch most days), pay is very competitive and the stock performs well. I've also found the health insurance to be great, and there are plenty of options to choose from.

Amazon faces problems at enormous scale, which means there are always interesting problems to solve. You have the opportunity to use just about any AWS service to accomplish your goals, and you'll always have the resources you need to finish your work.

Top talent is attracted to Amazon. You'll be working with some incredibly smart people.

You'll naturally gain a lot of AWS knowledge working at Amazon. If the time comes for you to change jobs, you'll be a highly sought-after asset because of this.

If you like traveling, you'll have the opportunity to take business trips. Most engineers visit HQ in Seattle once a year. As there are teams across the globe, you may need to visit other teams you're working with in different locations. In my experience, it's all been on a volunteer basis, so don't worry if you're not inclined to travel.

The culture at Amazon isn't for everyone, so read up on the Leadership Principles before joining.

You'll likely be part of an on-call rotation, averaging around one week every two months. Operational work is included in most SDE work, so you'll be addressing tickets and fixing security vulnerabilities for everything you own. Depending on your perspective, this can be a positive or a negative.

Promotions are uniquely difficult to get at Amazon. There's a large amount of paperwork you'll need to do, and ultimately the decision to promote isn't always up to someone who has worked with you. It's highly dependent on your history of working across teams and with engineers that are more senior to you, so you'll need to fight for those opportunities if you want to get promoted.

Keep up the good work, and maybe relax the amount of paperwork required for promotions.