Amazon Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

One common complaint I get from my friends to who I pitch Taro is why they should trust a company that is "Selling shovels during a gold rush".

I personally believe there is a ton of value in joining Taro but I can see their perspective since not every coaching/mentorship service has their clients' best interests in mind.

This question is more for Alex and Rahul but others are free to chime in. What is your response to this?

I'm thinking of joining Amazon as an L6 Applied Scientist. The reporting chain they've proposed to me looks something like:

VP -> Snr Dir -> Dir -> Snr Mgr -> Mgr -> Me

Now I've been made to understand that as L6, my official scope is Snr Dir, i.e. impact across teams that sit under Snr Dir. I'm concerned how far down the chain I am here, especially if I eventually want to grow to L7, which would require impact at the higher level (VP). I doubt reporting to the Snr Dir is on the table, but I'm wondering if I can try to convince them to let me report to the Dir. They're telling me that who your manager is doesn't affect your scope, but I'm skeptical. On the flip side, it is Mgr who seems very excited to hire me, and I'm wondering if mentioning this to either him or Snr Mgr (who I have a sell call with next week) will cause problems.

Any advice on how to navigate this situation would be most helpful.

I would like some info on how hiring decisions are made. I understand DSA and System Design are important but HMs know these aren't good predictors of performance so I see a disconnect there.

I'd like to understand what goes through the mind of the HM and/or committee before a decision is made.

I know it's a broad and complicated question that has different answers depending on the company, but any info is helpful.

My latest position was SDE II at Amazon, backend. I was laid off. I have not worked for 2 years. I find myself struggling with which project I should talk about in my interviews. Here are the projects I had worked on.

1. A project where I investigated how to create and analyze the right data to optimize something. This was at a previous company where we shipped highly technical software, and the software had nothing to do with the web. The project wasn't one where I built much of anything; the result was just an independent Python script. The technicals were in the weeds though. But I would say I spent more time on the project than the work needed me to.
2. A React Native side project. I did not launch the app, but the app worked on testing. My favorite project, as I learned a lot about planning, learning a new stack, and structuring my code. However, it's a side project and the stack is not related to what I mainly worked on at Amazon.
3. My 1st project at Amazon. A high level design of the project was done for me. The project was very simple technically: move a module from one service to another to support the deprecation of the former service. There were some choices of wiring where data goes in the new setup, but that was about it for the complexity. I worked with another team to discuss the data flow. I also broke down the project into small parts for a new grad SDE to do. I personally saw through the project to its successful launch.
4. My 2nd project at Amazon. I was working under another SDE II and he was the one who had done all the design, assigned me the parts to work on, and drove the successful launch. I remember the end business product well, but what I do not remember is the key high level code logic behind the scenes that make it work. As a consequence, even though I remember some parts of what I personally had worked on, I cannot drive a coherent narrative about them.
5. My 3rd project at Amazon. It was the first project at work I designed from scratch. I communicated with the technical project manager to get clear the requirements and thought about all the cases to cover to make a working design. I do not remember all the details of the cases I needed to cover but I can talk about them at a high level. The biggest downside of this project is that it was cancelled mid-implementation since another project it depended on was cancelled for reasons outside of my control. So this project never launched.

I am working with AWS and I was just promoted from L4 to L5 SDE role. I am yet to have the revised compensation discussion with my manager and was thinking if it is possible to negotiate the offer. During the annual PCS conversations, it was mentioned that the managers have more leverage for salary negotiations during the promo review. I want to understand what parts of the compensation I can negotiate upon. Does anyone have experience with this?

Thanks!

I'm fortunate to have someone who will refer me for whatever role I want at Amazon.

The problem is there are tons of very different teams and I can't tell which teams are growing or impactful. My intuition is mixed: Products drive revenue, so product teams should be the most impactful right? Quite easily not so as tooling teams can also scale massive impact at companies like these.

The first step I took is to reach out to my contacts at the company. I have multiple, but none of them seem to have a strong opinion, often indicating their own limited view across the company.

How should I think about this? Is there public data I can tap, or should I just get in wherever and transfer later?

I know about the Pomodoro Technique but I feel that 25 minutes is too short of a time block to get and stay in the zone.

How would you organize your day into time blocks for deep work while maintaining focus and not burning out?

• Four-hour blocks with a break in between?
• One eight-hour block (if there are no meetings)?
• One six-hour block?

I've been an SDE 2 at Amazon for the past 4 years, consistently exceeding expectations. However, I'm feeling burnt out, and it seems like support for my growth is lacking. I'm contemplating taking a career break, but uncertain about the current state of the industry and whether I'll find equivalent-paying jobs upon my return. What advice can you offer?

I just had an amazon behavioral interview. I'm a new grad SWE and interviewing for a non technical customer success role.

The interview was 3 behavioral questions. I tried to use STAR as much as possible but the interview was really like 15 ish minutes for the 3 behavioral questions. The interviewer did not follow up for 2/3 questions. At the end I asked 3 questions. total time was 20 minutes. Is it a red flag that my interview was only 20 minutes?

I think I was able to answer the behavioral questions and I mentioned the impact of my work/results at the end though I will admit I didn't go into super depth on the results part and focused more on the actions I think. This was my first real behavioral interview as well.

I've looked at the leadership principles. But it's a bit overwhelming the number of questions that can be asked. I dont want to be caught like a deer in headlights when I'm asked a question. But it also doesnt seem practical to prepare every question.

I'd love to know people's preparation strategy. Are you preparing 5-10 stories and then tagging them to different principles? if so what kinds of stories should I be preparing? i.e. what are the broad topics of each story?

Or Maybe are you preparing 1 different story for each leadership value?

Also If I'm asked "Who was your most difficult customer?" how would I answer this if I'm just a junior and have never dealt with customers first hand? or similar where I'm just like i've never been in this situation

For my Behavioral rounds Preparation.

1. I curated all the questions surrounding leadership principles
2. I also created STAR answers for each question

I try to demonstrate that I have led Projected and Solved challenging problems on my own. But even with that interviewers seem to downlevel me from L5 > L4 (Amzon Levels). what qualities I should exhibit to get L5 level and how should I prepare for it?

I'm an sde 1 at Amazon and been working there for 2 years. I have changed multiple teams during that time unfortunately. In every team, I have struggled with getting noticed by the team.

I have observed that the best performers talk about active tickets even when they are not on call. How do I balance between my task and working on extra tickets to get noticed?

What else can I do to get noticed apart from my own task and high sev tickets?

Hello, I have 3 years of experience and I'm an SDE II at Amazon. The Q1 promotion results are out, and I'm surprised to see many fast-track SDE III promotions. It seems to me that when the time is right and stars align, SDE III promotion can be quick, and if you stay in one team long enough, it wouldn't be hard to get to SDE III.

80% of my team are SDE IIs, and I don't see my possibility of SDE III promotion in the next 2 years unless:

1. I find some big opportunities that bring huge revenue to the organization
2. There's a major reorg, and I'm assigned to a new team, and the new team expands
3. My current team shrinks for some reason, I stay, and my team grows again. Interestingly, my team's senior manager and 2 senior engineers actually fall into the third bucket.

What do you think? Should I just relax, keep pace, and grow my skills, hoping for a promotion by job hopping when the market recovers?

I joined Amazon for my first tech job as an SDE I and was able to promote to SDE II after 1 year. Fast forward to 9 months after promotion, My onboarding buddy who has been here ever since the team was founded is leaving. I ended up being the SME for one of the team's projects that makes a lot of $$$, which means a lot of eyes are on it. Although we do have a couple SDE IIIs on the team, they've been more focused on other equally important projects and don't have too much knowledge on this one. I'm starting to feel the weight of the extra responsibility as I often get pinged for escalations, have a lot more say in meetings, and invited to meetings for the roadmap of this project. There was also a recent reshuffle in the Product side and I've become their go-to guy for anything related to this project.

Having joined the industry less than 2 years ago, I kind of feel like things are really moving fast and I'm a bit overwhelmed to be honest. I was still thinking on how to increase my technical depth after promotion, and I'm not even sure if this is a good situation to be in or not. But at the same time, I do want to overcome this and perhaps turn this situation into a growth opportunity.

In my forte review, there were many comments on the expectation of me evolving into a mature leader for the team and this feels like an opportunity to work on that. I'm kind of confused on what direction to take at the moment. What would be some things I can do to make the most of this opportunity and grow my leadership skills? I feel like before all this happened, I was focusing on growing my technical skills and didn't really pay atttention much to the leadership side.

This might be a vague question, so I just wanted to see if anyone has been in this situation and have any advice on how to best navigate this or share similar experiences

Looking for resources on increasing your team's / peer's productivity. I thought I've seen some videos / posts in the past about this and wanted to brainstorm some ways I can boost the productivity of those around me.

Hi everyone,

I hope this message finds you well. I'm currently an SDE-II at Amazon and have developed a keen interest in advancing my career towards AI, specifically in Vision and Autonomous Systems.

I am reaching out to seek advice on how to approach this transition within Amazon. I value my current role and team, but I'm eager to align my career with my growing interest in AI technologies.

Could anyone share their experiences or advice on how to discuss this career aspiration with my manager and skip level? Additionally, I would be grateful for any guidance on mentorship programs, internal channels, or resources that were instrumental in your career transitions within Amazon, particularly into AI-focused roles.

Any insights or recommendations on how to navigate this path would be immensely appreciated. Thank you for your time and help!

I am a back end engineer that works with Java. What steps could I take to make a switch to a job that works with hardware and software? I have some small side projects to learn more firmware related skills but I'm not sure how I could make something that could help me switch career fields.

I was an SDE-3 at Amazon until last year. Lack of exciting work and fear of layoff made me switch to a late stage startup as a Sr Software Engineer.

Now I am part of a very small team (3 engineers including me) and have been working on small scale projects which won't look great on my resume. I feel like I am stuck at my level and not sure how to move ahead. If I want to level up at my current company, I might have to spend a few years. My manager just got into her role and doesn't know what growth would be like for me. When I look at staff engineers in my company, I feel I am not at their level. I have thought about making a move again but I am immediately discouraged by the thought of wasting days and months in interview preparation after doing it just last year. Feeling really lost and looking for suggestions.

Sorry if the question is too open ended or vague

I have two offers and am having trouble deciding which one to take

Company A: Non-Tech company with ~1500 employees. They have a cloud computing division to manage their infrastructure

• Position: Cloud Engineer (AWS)
  • Work would involve provisioning AWS infrastructure, performing maintenance, upgrades, optimizations, migrating environments to the cloud, etc
• Base Salary: 135k
• Bonus: 10k (if performance is met)
• Location: New Jersey
• Work Style: 2 days in the office

Company B: Pre-seed stage startup (2 - 10 employees)

• Position: Software Engineer
  • Work would involve building new features for the startup including categorizing and ranking trivia questions by difficulty, etc
• Base: 110k
• Relocation: 5k
• Equity: 1%
• Location: Los Angeles
• Work Style: 2 days in the office
• Founder Background: Used to work in Big 3 consulting. His/her last position was scaling a Series A startup
• Pre-Seed funding: $2 million
• Targeted seed funding: $3 - $5 million
• Traction: The app was launched 5 months ago and has acquired 45,000 users. The business used to be a marketplace and that's when they raised their pre-seed round ($2 million). Now the business is a trivia app for college students

What am I looking for?

• I'm not sure. My top preference is career progression/learning ability and given I don't have a family the startup option does make sense, however ...
• I greatly value stability
  • I've been through the tech interview process for many iterations now and it is really tiring to have to start over every year due to internships/bad-culture/layoffs/potential startup failing
  • Being unemployed for ~10 months now, I would say the majority of my interviews were for startup companies so I feel that getting an offer at a non-startup company is more rare/valuable (maybe?)

Any thoughts are appreciated. Thank you!