Amazon Systems Engineer reviews

3.5

72% would recommend to a friend

(123 total reviews)
avatar

Andrew Jassy

47% approve of CEO

64% positive business outlook

Systems Engineer I employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 123 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Systems Engineer I professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Systems Engineer I professionals compared to other employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

123 reviews
4.0
Sep 4, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Amazon is an inspiring atmosphere where you are surrounded by brilliant minds; no matter your vertical, it is guaranteed that you will meet peers who truly raise the bar.

Cons

Amazon is heavily focused on feedback -- and positive feedback is hard to earn. This can make it a struggle to grow, and advance your career. Additionally, the work/life balance is weighted more towards work, than life (in my personal experience). This is not the case for all teams, but definitely is the case for a lot of the engineering teams.

3.0
Jul 21, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

AWS is the only one providing the best cloud experience and rich feature set so a lot to learn

Cons

There are tons of features planned for a given year and so you have mountains to cross. Specifically, NoSQL team has great operations pain and very harsh on decisions.

4.0
Jul 1, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1. It's in Seattle. 2. You get to support the O.G. Cloud. 3. Ultimate mobility - if you see a team you want to join, just start hanging out with them. If you're invaluable to your present team, it just takes a little longer. If you've been around, you've got a great shot at getting on one of the S3 ops teams -- only dev teams get resumes from recent grads. It's really hard, but it's all there, simply a matter of reading. Nothing at all off the shelf any more beside the hardware, all either open source or Amazon proprietary. Best integration of incident management and knowledge sharing, ever -- just read old tickets, all are heavily annotated. I strongly recommend this to cuspy olde UNIX admins, especially self-taught. Most important skill of all == log diving. Enormous and entertaining library of videos from principal engineers to teach the unique architecture. New model to scale to the always-increasing size of the cloud every few years -- you'll know when probability equations start showing up on the whiteboards in the hallway. Nothing wrong with developing or doing ops for other teams - my experience is limited to the S3 team.

Cons

Not just a time-sucker, can be a life-sucker. No one will force or even suggest putting in more time, it just happens because it's completely and utterly fascinating.

Viewing 109 - 111 of 123 Reviews

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