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Amazon

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Promotion

Promotion Guide

Requirements

You should be operating at 80%+ of the next level's guidelines to have a real case for your promotion.

You need to write a summary of your work for your promotion packet. The summary needs to include information about the following 5 core scopes of work:

  • Scope and influence
  • Ambiguity
  • Technical complexity
  • Execution
  • Impact

There is another section where you need to talk about how your work corresponds to Amazon's LPs; however, this section isn't as important as the others.

You need a minimum of 4 peer feedbacks to support your promotion case, but 6+ is recommended.

Documentation requirements

You should always be generating a large paper trail with every project you ship at Amazon. This saves you a lot of time putting together your promotion case as you don't need to write everything from scratch - You can simply compile everything you already have.

The documentation requirements at Amazon are pretty onerous:

  • SDE 1 -> SDE 2 promotion takes 5+ pages of documentation.
  • SDE 2 -> SDE 3 promotion takes 15+ pages of documentation (!!!).

Rating

You generally need a TT (Top Tier) or HV3 (High Value 3) rating to get promoted.

What Blocks Promotions?

  • SDE 1 -> SDE 2 promotions are generally held back because they're lacking in technical complexity.
  • SDE 2 -> SDE 3 promotions are generally held back because of lack of scope, influence, and impact.