Sr. UX Designer
How many Sr. UX Designers are there at Amazon and are they generally well respected?
Generally. It kinda depends on the group. Seems awareness of design has gone up but you'll still find teams with no designers so I think design hasn't been systemically integrated quite yet. The Devices team has a design studio and is led by Jenny Lam, who is well respected in the design community.
As a visual designer Jenny Lam is alright, but that site she made for her own firm Jackson Fish Market is a joke. Go to Jacksonfish.com and then look at a detail page for one of the work projects. The description text is jammed into a small box that reveals two lines, and you have to click it before you can scroll through it. But hey, the stuff looks cool...and not sure why cool aesthetics matter in Devices, when the whole point is to use the device to watch or do something else. I came in at L7, and I'm perplexed by some of the leveling choices in the design org.
People crave cool.
Some designers seem to think so. Also depends on what's being used; often it's really preferable that something just work easily and effectively.
There are a couple hundred senior ux designers at Amazon and are typically held in high regard. It's a wide band though with some outstanding people and some not-so-outstanding.
UX is regarded sometimes but Amazon is a dev company. A ux that prides themselves would never work for Amazon and would rather work for Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Uber (likely not this one due to reason fires). Look at the shitty Alexa app or fireTV UI. Can't compare to Netflix or other competitors out there. It's not that Amazon doesn't try (a little). It's just that most services are ridden with technical debt and Jeff has trained everyone to be data driven. But you can't always have the data ahead of time for UX and UI and hence there's more talking then anything. Coupled with what you can't do due to technical debt, what you end up with is a Frankenstine product. Take Marketplace's Seller Central for example. Changing the nav requires to work between at least 3 teams with their own unique set of technical debt and op1 shield so that's why it still uses the "design" from 10 years ago.
Boom.