Apply for Amazon Care as SDE2?
A recruiter from Amazon Care has reached out to me for a SDE2 position. I hear mix things about Amazon’s culture and compensation. Before dusting off my interviewing skills I would like to hear from the community if it’s even worth the time to apply. For context I am a Senior dev at Shopify. I love working on a team environment with people looking to help others grow. While that is mostly the case at Shopify, I have mixed feelings about their tech stack and SDLC. My compensation is in (usd) Base: 155k Stock: 150k on a 3 year schedule Full medical, dental vision Decent PTO Other nice perks, lunches, commuters money etc. YoE: 5 TC: 228k From a compensation and culture POV, is it a good move to go to Amazon? #engineering #software #swe
Aim for L6. Only accept the L5 if it's one of those huge out of band 400K+ offers. Amazon Care itself, while newer and smaller, still has several teams. Do you know which team you are interviewing with? It's a decent org which had some growing pains when it was no longer in stealth mode. The closer you are to the ML/NLP work, the better for you.
Not sure about the team yet. I’ve seen other people comment on Amazon’s poor WLB. What’s your experience like?
My manager was excellent and even stepped up for me and other teammates during document (PRFAQs, 6 pagers etc.) review, especially during the parts where we had to communicate domain specific technical details to the stakeholders (e.g., "The clinical notes are shit quality, we really need the doctors to start writing in a specific manner", "The routing system is plain overloaded, no switching algorithm/regime will work unless you hire more doctors licensed in these states","Asking the primary care physicians to shorten the sessions to < 15 min is a very bad idea"). My sister team which worked on implementing some of the NLP clinical notes stuff had it pretty good as well. Things do get extremely busy so it's often the full 40 hours per week but at least our team had clear WLB boundaries. My manager always clocks off on time saying that he has to spend time with his family and insists that we do the same. Not sure about other teams, but I'm pretty sure there was barely any on-call. Nevertheless some of the other teams were (as I heard so take it with a grain of salt) a complete shitshow wrt having no clear plan since healthcare is NOT an easy domain to step foot in.
Dm me I know referrals who can help and hook you up
Never take a downlevel. Tell the recruiter you are targeting L6 (senior). Compensation will be huge compared to yours now