Is a FAANG downlevel worth entertaining?
Been mulling over an offer to work at AWS. Interviewed for SysDev II(L5) and received offer for SysDev I(L4). Recruiter cited coding could use some work and scope of LP questions as reason for downlevel. Currently a senior consultant with a hopeful path to principal, mostly able to work autonomously as a cloud/DevOps engineer with a bit of guidance needed at times. Recently started interviewing candidates for my current team, and does some mentoring/assisting of junior engineers on top of client work.
TC offered is about 20% more than current TC. Didn’t apply directly, interviewed after them reaching out. I’m pretty okay with my current gig, but was willing to hear out about more pure engineering roles to dive deeper into various technical subjects.
Offer breakdown:
Tc: ~$220k
Base $185k
Year 1 sign on $32k
Year 2 sign on $27k
Rsu 25
Yoe: 10 total, 5 as cloud/DevOps engineer, 5 bouncing around systems engineering roles. Never held a software engineering role.
Dms welcomed
comments
The service I'd be supporting is an internal tool that analyzes and monitors and alerts on host access for internal infra. It processes large datasets and events in the order of ~1m requests per minute. The manager told me the tool is built using AWS services
For SDE L4 you’re expected to just be able to work on one area that your team owns. L5 works cross team under basically your sr manager. L6 works across all teams in your org. L7 is cross org.
SysDev essentially shifts all that down a level because of the nature of the work. As a SysDev your expected to be working at a systems level rather than software level. Working at a systems level means you’re going to need to inherently work with other teams to solve problems. L4 works cross team under the senior manager and all the others are shift down as well. Getting promoted for either role expects that you’re already working at the next level.
As for transitioning to another role it is done but it’s not easy. You’ve basically gotta be working both jobs at once. Prove that you can do the other job but you don’t want to be the low performer of your current role. I’ve heard of people basically doing full interviews to transition but never seen it. What I’ve seen the most is that people just start picking up some other type of work as part of their normal job, be useful to the manager so that they want you to do more and then transition. Changing roles though is a rigid process at amazon so the manager needs to really be able to prove that you’re doing the other work well.