Pros
You work with genuinely intelligent, capable people. The talent density is real, and you will learn a lot simply by being around sharp operators. There is budget and scale. When leadership decides something matters, money can be allocated quickly. The brand name and title carry weight. Having Amazon on your resume opens doors elsewhere.
Kontras
The core expectation is doing more with less. Everyone is overworked, across every team, and that pressure never lets up. Collaboration is theoretically your job, but practically impossible. Every team is resource constrained and incentivized to protect their own time, so even mutually beneficial work becomes a constant negotiation or outright resistance. Most systems, tools, and processes are fragile and patched together. Very little is actually fixed. Problems are worked around, not solved. A lot of time is spent creating initiatives, business cases, and projections that look good on paper. After launch, there is limited accountability for whether those projections were accurate or whether the product actually delivered value. This results in a growing pile of half-supported, low-quality products and services. Over time, things degrade, dependencies break, and the overall ecosystem becomes harder to manage rather than stronger. You can feel like you’re constantly sprinting from one launch to the next without ever seeing anything fully stabilized or meaningfully improved.