Great pay, terrible work life balance - Software Engineer Amazon Employee Review

2.0
27 Feb 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

+ High salary + Gaining experience with AWS resources + Ability to deploy and scale cloud infrastructure without too much worry about costs + Leveraging unlimited AI tokens + Lots of amazing tooling for AI incorporated into many processes eliminating pain points + Ability to own many hats and participate in lots of product discussion + Lots of documentation + Great healthcare benefits + Cross team collaboration + Free coffee everyday + Free IT vending machine for extra basic supplies + There are processes to prevent breaking glass of data and/or followup procedures when things go awry + Because of Amazon's hiring process, you tend to work with reliable, intelligent people + Free bananas + Lots of convenient, centralized abstractions to eliminate spin up time (code, pipelines, service to service communication, etc) + Nearly unlimited resource to base off of to speed up deployment

Cons

- Low total of paid holidays - 4 year vesting strategy is mainly the incentive to stay - Terrible work/life balance to meet unrealistic deliverable deadlines for a person/team, often resulting in more hours to meet deliverable and thus setting the standard for deliverables going forward - Having to heavily document and write a majority of your own successes to prove why you deserve to be promoted - Return to office 5 days a week - With AI, the expectation to deliver has increased far beyond the expectations that people are meant to handle - Everything is prefaced with a design document or a one-pager - Decisions made by higher ups often don't get propagated down until the day of the announcement (RTO, layoffs, etc) - Great talent laid off to support business decisions despite being one of the highest net profit grossing company - No Amazon Prime, discounts at Whole Foods, or free food at the office - No semblence of employee culture as everyone is focused on deliverables and neglecting social aspect due to work culture - Not enough desks to support RTO (some conference rooms were turned into desks/bullpens)

Explore other reviews about Amazon

5.0
27 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great people, fast moving environment and products that have a lot of reach

Cons

Layoff cycles and regular re-orgs

5.0
10 Jan 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Really smart people, a lot of opportunity for growth, always encouraged to be innovative, think big, and create something new. Competitive salary and benefits with other major tech companies. 100% self motivating work environment. No dress code and 4 legged friends are welcome.

Cons

You have to be self motivated. NO ONE will hold your hand and tell you that you're doing a great job. If you need constant affirmations from management, this company isn't for you.

3159
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