Career Advice About Amazon

What is the best time of year to apply to big tech/unicorn/generally highly sought-after positions? My thinking is to apply between July and the end of November because I know that is when many big companies release headcount for interns and new grads which I presume they also release headcount for mid-level and above. For more experienced job seekers, when have you noticed the best responses in your past job searches for getting interviews or what is your general approach to timing your job search? Thanks!

Hi Taro. I worked at Amazon as an SDE for a couple of years before I was laid off. Recently, I signed an offer for a 6 month contract at Amazon. I might get a one year contract at Meta soon though. I never worked at Meta before. I wonder if it is worth burning the bridge with Amazon to take the role at Meta. I have a few reasons for wanting to take Meta. Amazon is only 6 months and it may not get renewed. I don't want to put a short role on my resume and be looking for a job again in 6 months. Long term, I don't want to be at Amazon. Amazon really hurt my mental health. I would like to join Meta as a full time a lot more than I want to for Amazon. Their culture reputation is not great either, but I really believe it's better than Amazon. I have one reason for wanting to stick with Amazon: It's not like jobs fall out of the sky. I am returning to Amazon now and I may return there one day for a full time role even though I prefer not to.

English is not my first language. I don't know what to write or talk in all kinds of situations. I don't know if I lack critical thinking to think about points or is it because of lack of English proficiency. I have joined Toastmasters but its not helping that much. I am looking for 1-1 coaching in English speaking, writing, public speaking. Group discussions, driving meetings especially getting alignment, breaking down points, story telling are my biggest problems. Any recommendations to fix these issues?

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?

Context Of Company

This is a really well funded company (Bank) that underwent a large scale leadership change. The company's primary source of revenue was never it's tech capabilities, however with the new leadership change they're looking for a large scale revamp on how the existing systems work and are working on setting upto a FAANG equivalent engineering environment. This is vision is consistent across the leadership upto the CEO. This org currently consists of multiple Staff engineers from Twitter, Meta, Amzn and Google leading big initiatives.

Personal Context

I'll be soon taking up an offer in this company and will be joining this freshly created Org, where I've opportunity to be among the first 10-15 engineers to join with potential of the org to grow over 100+ engineers. There are lot of existing tech that have been already deemed unscalable due to previous decisions and have been a known business blockers, these tech require either re-write or a large refactor or a completely different viewpoint on tackling this problem. This will involve me working with Engineers who've built this system (Not part of this new Tech Org, rather the old existing infra), I've been already given a heads up from my potential manager that there can be potential hesitancy that the existing engineers may feel and wouldn't be too open to provide all information necessary as our systems will be replacing their soon (Have been reported that this has happened). There isn't a concept of internal wiki similar to Amazon or other Big Tech, hence lot of this is just domain knowledge etc. Fortunately the leadership is aware of this and is taking steps to answer this, and takes into consideration when scoping for projects and setting up right expectations. The following are certain concerns that I've, and wanted to understand what is the best course of action I can take up to make my onboarding successful. This is my Current plan, given i'll be among first engineers to join this team. Understand domain, reach out to multiple PMs and document all pain points, problems we are solving in long term & Short term. Go through code base of relevant packages and start adding their UMLs, HLD etc to best of my abilities to a document to move towards creating a Knowledge base. Socialize with engineers from the related org and try to gain their confidence, and potentially get few KT sessions (Not sure how i'll go about this as the team is situated in different city). Work with manager to setup boy-scout rule, such that everyone onboarding will incrementally add more to the existing knowledge base. Follow Up Questions : I still haven't taken up the offer yet and still have a week before I can respond. The increase in pay and the growth opportunity in the new company is significantly big, I can see myself reaching Sr.SDE in < 2 years and Staff in < 4 years there due to the problem space being so fresh and getting a really early head start. However, I'm slightly concerned if the lack of co-operation from other org and lack of documentation, and the fact that the entire org is being setup fully freshly could be a concern. What's the best course of action i could take to minimize this risk? Second, one would view moving out from FAANG to a not well known company as a downgrade, would this still hold true if the problem space and opportunities in the new company is more complex?

Manager and I have a disagreement on creating a promo doc as per the approach suggested by Rahul and Alex . So to avoid losing the time I went ahead with working on a XFN project, say Project XFNA , as it has high visibility and chance of impact. Due to the complexity I had to spend lot more time on it than I initially estimated. It meant putting 1 week time learning/testing a frontend framework , Angular and I am a backend developer and never done Frontend coding earlier. What happened was.. my main project's progress ( say Projects B , which doesn't have impact opportunities in the short term) got delayed by a week , due to my focused attention on Project XFNA. I am Mid-Level Software Engineer [SDE 2] at Amazon. I will need to defend my time on this project XFNA as I focused on it purely for delivering quick impacts. So can I say to my Mgr that I "I took this initiative to work on Project XFNA for showing impact in the short term". If not, how should I rephrase it?

I'm going to be joining Amazon soon and the team I'm on is going from 4/5 people a month ago to I believe 9/10 people (counting me). Our team is going to be comprised of SDE 2's and 1's (I'm an SDE 1). I'm wondering what's the best way to have the best onboarding experience during this time. While it will be nice that I will have a decent amount of people who will be in the same boat as me in terms of onboarding, I'm also worried that my manager and more senior teammates won't have as much time for things like 1 on 1s, answering questions, helping me onboard, etc. if they're also helping other people on our team in addition to their own work.

As I'm starting to join a team soon(and knowing this answer varies by team, level, and company), I'm wondering how long does onboarding take and what does it mean to be fully onboarded within your team

Hey everyone,

As I've just passed E4 infra, has anyone recently finished team match? How long did it take for you? It's been a week and I haven't received too much news.

I'm open to Seattle, Bellevue and SF Bay Area.

Not a manager here but I strongly feel like understanding my manager's perspective is essential for me to successfully navigate my tech career. I understand that if a software engineer wants to become promoted, they need to complete projects with increasing scope involving increased technical depth, ambiguity, impact, etc in addition to many other things. How is this scope defined for engineering managers? Does it work the same way where engineering managers are rewarded for leading a team that develops highly ambitious products in terms of users, features, etc? Does the number of engineers on the team matter? If so, how does an organization prevent empire building from happening?

I am going to join as an SDE2 at amazon in couple of weeks. This is my first FAANG. I work on an oracle ECom platform.I don’t use design patterns often. Please recommend how important design patterns are in FAANG. What are the main ones ?

I have been an Android engineer since my first job 7 years ago. I learned React and React Native along the way and made myself into making apps for iOS. I really like working on this environment and would like to gear myself up with native iOS dev skills. I do get to design solutions and review other mobile engineers' design docs and code. I often find myself struggling to review the objective C code and nuances of iOS platform API usage (like animations, background operations, ARkit etc). Where should I start to get better in iOS native app development? I want to become better at Writing objective C/ Swift code using native iOS platform APIs Reading iOS platform documentations Thanks!

During my first 1 on 1 with a manager, I asked him if he could help me find a mentor and he said he would find one within our overall organization. He also said he could find me a manager within overall Amazon if I want. This would for overall mentorship in Amazon vs being limited to the scope of just my organization. What are some advantages/disadvantages of having 2+ mentors? Also are there any qualities I should be(or probably more likely asking him to be) on the lookout for those 2 mentors?

My starter project was to migrate a web service to a new API which offers similar functionality. This was intended to be a pretty straightforward migration, mostly renaming + replacing some strings. However, this project took much longer than my manager or I anticipated. How could I have predicted and prevented this?

These are Google levels for discussions/comparison sake and that I came in under-leveled. I can do work in below capacities: L3 - individual contributor and doing my tasks well. L5 - Delegating work to others as well. means developing and maintaining relationships XFN teams which are costly in terms of time/meetings it requires in order to do that. Also doing system designs /architecture/ planning /preparing content for consumption. If I work in the L5 scope ..will the calibration meetings/equivalent give me sufficient credit for that or will I still be viewed as a L3 ( my actual level. If so then my raw code output will be primary metric)? Code output is something I won't be able to do if I focus on delegating work ( scope of L5). So will my L5 work lead to penalties if I am viewed as L3? Lines are bit blurred in terms of R&R as I have to do product management work as well in order to get the project to succeed. I have regular meetings with many L5/L6s in order to drive the ideas and occasional ones with Directors and Senior Directors to get their buy-ins.

Hi all, I need an advice on quite a random thing. I recently changed teams at Amazon. Since I shared a close bond with my previous team members, I continue to hang out with them sometimes and my ex-manager is quite aware of it. (He was new, and has worked with the team for less than an year) Is it fine if I continue engaging with old friends, or does it make me look bad from professional aspect?

tldr - is it worth giving up brand name (amazon) for higher pay and potentially better work culture, especially if long term goal is entrepreneurship?

Hi Taro community! I'm hoping to get some guidance from those who have navigated similar career decisions. I have two new grad offers and am trying to evaluate them strategically based on my longer-term goals. Background: CS degree from top university Multiple SWE internship experiences Strong interest in understanding business impact beyond just coding Naturally drawn to product/business side but also enjoy technical challenges Want to eventually move into entrepreneurship/product roles while building strong technical foundation The offers (both in-person in canada): Amazon Base: 79k USD, TC: 112k USD (minimal initial stock vesting) Pro: Strong brand name, good learning opportunity Con: Team allocation uncertain, heard mixed experiences about WLB BitGo (crypto/blockchain infrastructure) Base: 115k USD, TC: 125k USD Many ex-FAANG engineers Smaller company but established product More direct access to leadership/decision-making My questions: How much does FAANG experience actually matter for future career flexibility (especially if interested in entrepreneurship/product roles)? For those at Amazon - how much control do you really have over team placement? Are there strategies to land on teams with:

• Good WLB
• Product-minded tech leads
• Opportunities to understand business impact
• Growth-oriented culture Or is it purely luck? For those who've worked at both large tech and smaller companies - what are the key tradeoffs in terms of learning opportunities and career growth? Especially interested in hearing from those who later moved into entrepreneurship or product roles. Any red flags I should look for during team matching/final conversations that might indicate poor team culture? Would really appreciate insights from those who've navigated similar decisions or transitioned between these types of roles. Looking to optimize for both technical growth and exposure to product/business thinking. Thanks in advance for any guidance!

My team is quite small but we own a handful of critical services. Because of the small size, our on-call rotation is around 6 weeks or less but the actual load is somewhat manageable. We do not get an intolerable amount of high severity pages but get a lot of low severity tickets. We constantly work on projects that support goals for other teams that always seem to be higher priority while our tech debt grows. We have identified longer term fixes for some of recurring issues but never have the time to implement them. Most of our planned work for the upcoming year involve modernizing infrastructure or migrating existing services. I'm concerned about whether staying on this team would be conducive to my career growth.

Since Dec 2021 to Aug 2022, My managers changed 4 times after and I got promoted from sde1 to 2. Due to multiple projects and managers, I could not take ownership as I was still in ramp up phase but manager was expecting more at the SDE2 level, pointing issues, demotivating. So I took internal transfer to a different team. I am in this new team for 3 months. 1 month - I took to even understand the basics. Manager left and new manager joined. I had to go on vacation for 15 days. I don't have metrics to show that I am performing at the SDE2 level because I didn't get design projects (design phase has already been completed by the time I joined this team). No OPS, this is a new product. There are no operational tasks. Working on beta launch. I am the last person who joined this team. I don't have anyone to become mentor since I have limited knowledge on this new team and work Have not taken interviews due to hiring freeze Worried about Q1 performance cycle in 2023. 2022 was difficult for me to show any impact. Is there anything I can do now to not get low rating in Q1? At this point, I am no more interested in work and just want to leave due to lack of mentorship. I have a buddy who answers questions if I ask in this team but I don't have anyone to mentor me to guide me to see what kind of projects I can work, coming up with the initiatives. I feel stuck. There are no hirings happening outside and inside the company. What can I do to proceed further?

I am working in 3 XFN projects (Say Projects A, B ,C) at the same time. Manager wants success in Project A for sure . But he doesn't allow me to be fully dedicated to Project A. He also wants me to come with suggestions to make project A successful. The thing is Projects B & C are huge time consumers and I am left with very little time for Project A. How should I approach my manager to assign me fully to Project A. I have successfully deliver projects in past when I was assigned to a single project only . I am bad at multi-tasking. Project A's success will definitely increase chances of my promo.

Hello, I am a recent graduate with a background in Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. I have Amazon’s final virtual interviews, consisting of four rounds, in 10 days, and Google’s final virtual interviews, also comprising four rounds, scheduled for early November. Although I passed the online assessments for both companies, I am not at all confident in my upcoming interviews. I have realized that my Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) skills, as well as my proficiency in Leetcode, are quite very rusty. There have been times when I struggled to solve many of the Leetcode problems. I am currently using Neetcode to practice DSA and advanced algorithms, but I am feeling demotivated about tackling these coding problems and breaking into MAANG, despite having secured interview opportunities. I would greatly appreciate any advice on how I should approach my preparation if I were to start over from a beginner's perspective. For Amazon’s interview, I have been following a 1-to-0 approach rather than a 0-to-1 strategy—focusing on reviewing solutions, understanding problems, and recognizing patterns using Neetcode and Grokking the Coding Interview, rather than actively solving the questions. With only 10 days remaining, how can I enhance my performance under pressure and prevent freezing during Amazon's coding interviews? Additionally, how can I sustain this momentum for Google’s interview preparation? Thank you for your time and guidance.

Sometimes I sit in meetings that I feel aren't really necessary. How can I better identify whether these meetings are necessary and propose a better asynchronous form of communication (slack post, quip doc, etc) if they aren't? Some of these meetings include status update meetings (besides standup), and meetings where people are there just to absorb knowledge. Is it a general rule of thumb to have meetings primarily to get alignment on decisions? Are there cases where we can get alignment asynchronously as well via commenting on a slack post/quip doc, etc.