Amazon Principal Software Development Engineer reviews

3.5

47% would recommend to a friend

(115 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

39% approve of CEO

87% positive business outlook

Principal Software Development Engineer employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 115 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Principal Software Development Engineer professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Principal Software Development Engineer professionals compared to other employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

115 reviews
4.0
Oct 23, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Stretches and grows you in ways you didn't know you could grow. High stakes problems and fantastic place to learn.

Cons

Lack of transparency for organizational planning. Promotion and performance reviews are fair but opaque, which stifles the ability for people to learn what they need to do to make the leap.

4.0
Aug 16, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

High quality and dedication of employees. Interesting and challenging technical problems: scale AND (application) complexity. Cooperative working environment; not excessively political. Amazon still has a lot of new things left to do. Frugailty is taken seriously: the work's the thing. Totally. Seattle is a great place to live.

Cons

Difficulty being able to leap-frog the state of the art. On-call can be very draining. Compensation is only average (but at least it seems to be average). Benefits aren't stellar. "It's still day one" gets tiresome. Frugality is taken pretty seriously: no frills (i.e. no free anything). Hard to publish or get permission to talk about work outside the company.

4.0
Jun 23, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

very interesting distributed system; large problems; can get work done;

Cons

sometimes hard to get all the right groups working together; I hate watching the same mistake happen just because it's a new team; operations load is non-trivial; sometimes it feels like a bad cross between a startup with not enough resources and a big company with too much bureaucracy

Viewing 112 - 114 of 115 Reviews

Glassdoor has 251,278 Amazon reviews submitted anonymously by Amazon employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Amazon is right for you.