Amazon SDE II Backend Engineer vs Google SWE III Engineering Productivity

I have offers from Google and Amazon and wanted to get some second opinions on my situation. The compensation is comparable between roles for the cost of living and I have no preference between the bay area (not Mountain View) for Google and Seattle for Amazon. Google is a dream company that I would like to stay at for a while because of the great engineers to learn from, the great benefits, and better work-life balance. I am, however, not interested in the Engineering Productivity role after learning more about it and talking to more teams about the role. I thought I'd be working on things like their version control system or their cloud IDE, but the teams I have talked to only make testing infrastructure to stress test services or for the other engineers to test against. It sounds repetitive and not a good place for me to learn how to make scalable systems, just how to test if they are scalable. I also have fears that I won't be working with the talent that Google is known for. Before SWE - Productivity Engineer was created there were roles like SETI and SET that had lower hire bars and required a re-interview in order to transition to SWE. When they rolled into SWE I doubt they re-interviewed every engineer and either fired them or converted them to SWE. They likely rolled them all into SWE which means one of the reasons I'm interested in taking the offer isn't quite what I'll be getting. I also hear mixed messages about how difficult it would be to join as a Productivity Engineer and move to a general SWE. You don't need to re-interview but you also wouldn't be developing the stack and skills they are looking for. On the other hand, I hear lots of horror stories about Amazon and I'm doing my best to talk to people on the team to see if this area is known for being very demanding. Working with ML engineers on a new greenfield space to develop features for a consumer product that everyone knows of sounds very fulfilling. I also feel like I'll grow the skillset that I want which is to learn how to build scalable distributed systems using modern technologies and infrastructure. Since Amazon is so hit and miss, I'd likely be scared to move around for fear jumping into a toxic work environment, meaning I wouldn't see myself staying there long. I also hear that Amazon's engineers aren't as good as google's engineers, so I might not grow as quickly. TLDR: Would you take the job at your dream company with undesirable work or a job with your dream work at an undesirable company? Edit: I have 3 years of experience #software #engineering #swe #google #amazon