What's the TC guesstimate for an AWS TAM in the northeast? And what's WLB like?
I sort of want amazon on my resume for the resume points and I sort of don't want to travel anymore. I have 4 years of Cloud Architecture for large companies plus many years of general devops and computer experience. Should I go for the TAM role or try for a Solutions Architect? What's the travel actually like? Should I even believe the 15% number? And how's the WLB? They're telling me "you never get called when you're on call" and my first thought is "you're telling me I work for three people now and I expect to never get called?"
TAMs are a component of the Enterprise Support org, and have on call rotation. SAs do not have on-call, and part of the SA org aligned with the Sales org (but not quota incentivized). Both roles can have a fair bit of travel, it'll depend on your customers and/or territory. I'm an SA with a 5-state territory, and usually have a couple 2-3 day trips a month. Both roles are highly technical, but SA will be more business/sales focused while TAM is very support-ish.
I am a AWS TAM. First, having an “on-call rotation” is cluster based. Mine for example there is no rotation , I have 3 primary customers and I am always “on-call” unless I’m on vacation. In the last 7 months, I have had 1 page from a customer and 6 internal pages. Second, travel is different for each customer. I have 1 customers go onsite 1 time a month. And I have others I go onsite every other week. Third, this is the best WLB job I have had. I’m completely autonomous. The expectations are I take care of my customers. If they are happy and the Account Team is happy then I’m golden. I can work from anywhere and anytime. If you do not have any onsites with your customer then you can work from anywhere. Fourth, this is proactive Support. My break down of what I spend my time on with my customers. ~10% of your time is doing support work ~25% of your time is doing SA work ~20% of your time is doing tech deep drives ~20% of you time is helping the customer with strategic initiatives ~25% of your time is providing the customer with insights and recommendations to improve operational excellence, security, cost savings, governance, etc (think Well-Architected Framework) —— This is absolutely not sales. We are not supposed to sell them a darn thing. Our metrics are based around Cost Optimization and how much we can help them save. For more information look at the comments by AWS 🍌🍌 in this post. They are a very accurate view of the AWS TAM role and mirrors what I posted above. Check out this post! "Senior Solution Architect vs Senior Technical Account Manager (Finance Careers)" https://us.teamblind.com/s/1Et55Xeh
Thanks! Great reply!
Awsome information. Wish you all the best.
Its more like 30% travel. You're part of the support team and work with presales account team. You'll get calls directly from your account base sometimes too. And no, presale SAs are part of the account team that travels 40%+. Also, neither of these roles are technical delivery. If you want post sales technical delivery, hands on stuff you need to look into postsales (pro-serve) SA/consultant roles.
By "account base" you mean the three companies I would be assigned to? Does this happen at crapoclock in the morning?
Unless something changed, TAM's account base is around half dozen or I may be thinking of AE. Either way Yes I mean the companies you are assigned to. Its both high escalation technical support, triaging and sales (driving increase of their AWS spend, hence working with account teams as well)