Amazon Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

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!

I recently interviewed with two 100-person startups and both of them have one round of "pair programming" interview. In that round, we do live coding with a very simple coding question. An example question is to design a Robot class that has integer 2D coordinates and listens to keyboard input to move up/left/right/down - Intro to Programming level questions. They emphasis on class methods design and how the solution code is structured.

During the interview, I feel like the interviewer has a clear answer in mind of how it should be structured, but I can't read their mind. I asked what's the use case of my class (how it's called, call patterns, future features, etc...) and the interviewers say something like use your best judgement or ask the question back. The interviewers don't seem to be interested in input parsing and edge cases (like how many edge cases could there be for such a simple question?). They also asked what would you do if you want to deploy it to prod, which feels more confusing (I answered a few metrics, logging, tracing and monitoring stuff but not sure if that's what the interviewer is asking for).

I failed both, but I want to get some learnings out of it. What are interviewers looking for in this round and how should people prepare for it?

I recently joined a Big Tech company. My assigned mentor is helpful when I have questions, and is also friendly.

However, apart from asking questions when I get stuck, I'm not sure how to best use their time so I can onboard and grow effectively. Does anyone have some suggestions and insight on this?

I've considered asking them to explain how some parts of the codebase work when I have issues, but it feels like unless I work on those parts of the codebase, I will forget what I learn. The domain and codebase is large so this feels low-ROI, especially since I am not working on some of these pieces.

Background:

Being pressured to deliver at high speed all the time, my team doesn't seem to value wiki type documentation a lot.

When starting a project/feature, we often have a high level design doc & design meeting to talk about high level infrastructure, and we make key trade-off decisions together as a team. If we are lucky, we get another low level design doc & meeting focused on sequencing of actions & interaction between class level objects.

We rarely seem to go back to our initial design doc after initial design phase of a project to update them and explain the actual final product we built and maybe some additional design decisions we made during implementation.

As a result, documentations are kind of dead after facilitating the initial design review. For legacy projects, high quality docs are extremely hard to come by and most just rely on reading large amount of code to understand how things work (nothing wrong with this but I think high quality documentation can save lots of time here).

I understand we don't want to boil the ocean and write everything in painstaking details, but we should at least have enough to help people understand responsibility of services and contract between them.

Questions:

• Could you share your view on this topic and how you find your balance?
• Do you believe it's always worth it to go back to documenting after finishing a project/feature and update it as if you are explaining it to someone new to the team/project?
• Could you share any resources we might already have on this topic as well?