Amazon Principal Software Development Engineer reviews

3.6

61% would recommend to a friend

(114 total reviews)
avatar

Andrew Jassy

52% approve of CEO

84% positive business outlook

Principal Software Development Engineer employees have rated Amazon with 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 114 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Principal Software Development Engineer professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Principal Software Development Engineer professionals compared to other employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

114 reviews
4.0
Aug 16, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

High quality and dedication of employees. Interesting and challenging technical problems: scale AND (application) complexity. Cooperative working environment; not excessively political. Amazon still has a lot of new things left to do. Frugailty is taken seriously: the work's the thing. Totally. Seattle is a great place to live.

Cons

Difficulty being able to leap-frog the state of the art. On-call can be very draining. Compensation is only average (but at least it seems to be average). Benefits aren't stellar. "It's still day one" gets tiresome. Frugality is taken pretty seriously: no frills (i.e. no free anything). Hard to publish or get permission to talk about work outside the company.

4.0
Jun 23, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

very interesting distributed system; large problems; can get work done;

Cons

sometimes hard to get all the right groups working together; I hate watching the same mistake happen just because it's a new team; operations load is non-trivial; sometimes it feels like a bad cross between a startup with not enough resources and a big company with too much bureaucracy

4.0
Jun 12, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The scale and breadth of the work is energizing, and I am free to solve problems in just about any way I like. The people are also generally charged, smart and inspiring making it fun to meet and work with most everyone.

Cons

Projects are often under resourced and overly ambitious, creating an frenetic unfocused environment that can sometimes be hard to get simple things done. The frugal mindset is sometimes just cheap, which can cost more in the long run. It's okay to spend money when it ends up being well amortized.

Viewing 112 - 114 of 114 Reviews

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