Pros
Fast-paced: you don't often feel like you aren't doing anything Customer-obsessed: most of the time you are delivering things that are valuable Large scale: Mostly working on systems with large traffic, learn how to design with scalability in mind Strong culture: Most employees are go-getters and trying to do the right thing. This creates a pretty open day-to-day environment. Overall I have had a very positive experience at Amazon
Cons
First-To-Market: Amazon is successful because we launch fast, but this often means introducing tech debt and hacks. Tech debt reduction rarely gets prioritized, even if it has clear business value in launching features faster. Tools?: we use a lot of internal tools, many of which don't have clear documentation. Error handling, measurement and root cause analysis are challenging as there is no standard across teams--this means you ssh into hosts a lot to diagnose issues Business owners not technical: At least in my org, business leaders are not technical, and a lot of them aren't even very good at writing business proposals. This causes some frustration among the dev team that we aren't often pursuing best options. Also business owners are sometimes just yes-man to higher ups. Mixed Quality of Team members: There is varied quality among all SDE levels. In some ways, SDE III still overrides SDE II decision even if other people don't agree. Promotions are very political, and determined more by SDM/TPMs who don't even work with SDE on a day to day. Compensation: Amazon pays lower than certain other comparable employers. Also you don't really start getting paid real money until year 2. Compensation is also not very performance based.