Decent teams within AWS or Alexa
TL;DR: Looking for groups within AWS or Alexa that have decent team culture and would be a good place to grow further as an engineer. Longer version: I've been working for 5 years in defense. My leaders have always been appreciative of my work, but I'm finding that the technical challenges I solve are not all that interesting to me. On top of that, the skills I exercise at work are not nearly as in-demand as the skills of a backend developer. I've been hoping to get more exposure to cloud-native and backend development. My approach to my job search has been to cast a wide net and try to apply to a bunch of places, even if I feel underqualified. Having read some less-than-flattering opinions on sites like this one, I am trying to get an idea of some teams within AWS or Alexa orgs that have decent team culture and would be good to learn a lot of new skills. I'd be hoping to enter as SDE II, but at my current comp, even SDE I might be a step up. TC: $115k YoE: 5 #amazon #aws #alexa
If you want to interview for Sde1 then you must lie about yoe in your resume to be 3 yoe or less, companies prefer to reject than downlevel. Anyways the leetcode bar is the same for both, just more muturity in design and maintenance for sde2.
Former Northrop here and was in a very similar position as you a few years ago. I get the impression you are targeting Amazon because their recruiters keep pinging you. I've had success cracking Google, Apple, Microsoft and other places as well. The interview processes are not that different. Not trying to flex but encouraging you to aim high and leetcode hard. You can do it!
Why just Alexa or AWS? If you are interested in backend development there are plenty of other teams that have backend work. Also I would not recommend Alexa. I view as the worst org at Amazon.
Thanks, I picked AWS and Alexa since their recruiters are the most incessant. I guess that leads me to believe I stand a better shot actually getting in to those groups.
why worst org though?