Pros
Good office facilities, fair compensation, and some kind individuals.
Cons
If you were charmed by the Jack Ma narrative and think that Alibaba is different from most other Chinese conglomerates, think again -- he's gone and whoever took his place is asleep at the wheel, at least when it comes to this team. When you look past the facade of a fancy office and other surface-level / material perks, this is a deeply soulless and unsatisfying place to work. Being outside of the Hangzhou HQ, you will almost certainly have no real power to change anything. I'm pretty sure upper leadership would agree to this point behind closed doors, as they are obviously kowtowing to HQ as they spend their days in endless meetings, pretending to have any actual clout in the greater organization. It must kill them inside, but they get paid enough to be okay with indefinitely being a cog. Besides the lack of heed paid to "local" hires, I have never seen a company with such a near-criminal disregard for its customers despite claiming to be "customer first." I witnessed countless instances of negligence and fraud without there ultimately being any accountability for those culpable. Escalation of such issues was clearly unwelcome, as that would involve a disproportionate amount of work up the chain of command to address what would never have occurred were there a functional resolution process to begin with. This is a bureaucratic nightmare of a corporate culture, complete with top-down "command and control" and endless layers of nebulous middle management who care little for their reports and are desperate to game their KPIs for promotion. If it's not attached to an already decided-upon KPI, it may as well not exist, as evinced by a customer experience that is qualitatively awful, because leadership is happy as long as the revenue numbers keep going up. This myopic approach fails to consider how much growth potential is still goes wasted, but this is a place that is all about blind cheerleading and shuns meaningful critique or dissent. All tropes of hypocrisy with regard to a company's stated values are at play here. One of my most trenchant and instructive memories during my time at Alibaba was at the goodbye drinks for a bright, talented colleague who had worked there for years. Once most people had filtered out, she began to cry, because no matter how hard they worked, and after all those years of their life, almost nothing they did ended up making a difference to the product or company. The main takeaway I had working here is that you can take away a solid paycheck, but you have to be okay with having almost no real impact. If you want to go the established-company route, I would advise advise that you save yourself some time and frustration you work to get into a Western company.