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Amazon Web Services

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Amazon not to be trusted - Data Engineer II Amazon Web Services Employee Review

2.0
Apr 24, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great Pay and benefits are good. Get to work with fun technology and good co-workers generally.

Cons

Leadership cannot be trusted. They would sacrifice their own grandmother to save a dollar. The company will tell you anything to get you through the door, only to change everything once you're employed. I've been repeatedly lied to by my direct management and indirectly through the S-Team about company direction and policies. Don't fall for the propaganda about Corporate workers being treated fairly compared to dissatisfied hourly factory workers - it's all false. Exceptional work goes unrewarded, as raises are rarely given regardless of circumstances. You're merely a cog in their machine, replaceable at any moment regardless of your personal situation. Policy trumps people here, always. Work-life balance is practically non-existent. They're one of the largest H1-B employers in the country - just look up all the different names Amazon operates under on the H1-B list and you'll see they're #1. They exploit cheaper labor, provide minimal benefits, force long hours until workers are exhausted, then discard them accordingly. Senior leadership is delusional, believing 9/10 employees love commuting to the office for RTO5. I can assure you 9/10 think the CEOs are completely out of touch with reality. If I could do it over, I wouldn't offer my God-given talents to this company for any amount of money. Unfortunately, after relocating across the country based on their lies, I'm stuck until the job market improves or I can relocate again. Don't make my mistake by working for this horrible company. Remember, they spend enormous sums to be ranked as the #1 employer in the country each year, with marketing departments dedicated to making their lies believable. You WILL be lied to and discarded as soon as they find a cheaper replacement, even without any real experience. It's astounding how they can continue to operate, but there's always another sucker willing to take the bait for the right price, becoming the next victim of their people-eating machine. Get in make your money do as little as you can get away with and plan an exit strategy. That is the only smart more to make with this company.

Explore other reviews about Amazon Web Services

5.0
Jun 16, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great company with challenging assignments

Cons

Lot is expected of you

4.0
May 12, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Operated in systems that had real scale, operational constraints, and production consequences.

Cons

Working at Amazon Web Services gave me strong exposure to distributed systems, operational ownership, and production-scale infrastructure, but there were definitely tradeoffs as well. One downside was that, like many large organizations, ownership could become fragmented. You often own a subsystem or workflow rather than an entire product end-to-end, which can limit exposure to broader architectural decision-making unless you deliberately seek it out. There was also significant process overhead. Design reviews, operational processes, dependency coordination, and organizational alignment were valuable for learning rigor, but they can slow iteration compared to smaller engineering teams. Another challenge is that large internal ecosystems can abstract away infrastructure complexity. AWS has extensive internal tooling, deployment systems, and operational platforms, which are powerful, but some of that experience does not transfer directly outside the company. I also found that operational work could dominate engineering time at points. Handling production issues, retries, integration failures, and on-call responsibilities teaches reliability engineering well, but it can reduce the amount of time spent on deeper technical exploration or greenfield development. Finally, there is the perception aspect. AWS is a strong name, but experienced interviewers know there is wide variance between teams and roles. The company name opens doors, but ultimately you still need to demonstrate technical depth, ownership, and strong engineering judgment independently of the brand.

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