4 ms·

The Amazon Web Services team is hiring for on-site positions in Seattle (WA), Luxembourg, Tokyo, Herndon (VA), and Cape Town (South Africa), Dublin (Ireland), a

The Amazon Web Services team is hiring for on-site positions in Seattle (WA), Luxembourg, Tokyo, Herndon (VA), and Cape Town (South Africa), Dublin (Ireland), and Slough (UK). We don't offer remote work, but some of the positions do include relocation assistance. I've scraped our official job site and used the data to create a tag cloud of the jobs at http://awsmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/jobs/all_aws_jobs.html http://awsmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/jobs/all_aws_jobs.html . I'm still working on the styling. The official AWS job site is at Our official job site is http://aws.amazon.com/jobs http://aws.amazon.com/jobs . There are too many types of jobs to list here. We need developers, business developers, managers, solutions architects, trainers, and technical support.

euroclydon 16y ago
AWS seems to have more open positions than I would imagine they should. What are the turnover/pay/working conditions like there?
- jeffbarr 16y ago
  I don't have an official turnover figure, but I've been there 8.5 years and counting. As far as working conditions, people show up and they work. We don't have a whole lot of toys or frills at the office. We don't get free food or drinks, but we are paid well and can afford to buy our own. The focus is on meeting customer needs and on shipping stuff that works well and doesn't break as it scales or endures heavy loads. We ship often and run fast (see the AWS blog at http://aws.typepad.com http://aws.typepad.com to get an idea of how fast). Teams are responsible for building and running services, and for fixing them when they break. Many teams measure the number of high-priority tickets generated by their services over the course of a year and set year-over-year goals to drive the number down. As a dev, you might get to carry a pager from time to time, and you will learn to build services that are so robust that they never wake you up :-). We are really happy with the success of AWS to date, and that's why we are hiring. As a new employee you'll be put to work right away on something that is of real and immediate value to the company. You'll learn on the job and you'll get to rub shoulders with really sharp people. Pay is competitive by industry standards and is generally a mix of cash and stock grants. We also have a full suite of benefits.
  - euroclydon 16y ago
    Thanks for the great answer! It sounds very professional. I've read most of Steve Yegge's old blog posts, and was always struck by how Amazon's culture is one that values solid technical skills and experience.
    - jeffbarr 16y ago
      You are welcome. Will you be applying?
cperciva 16y ago
There's a bug in your tag cloud: You're splitting on whitespace. The tag "venture capitalists", for example, really isn't the same as the tag "venture" plus the tag "capitalists"...
- jeffbarr 16y ago
  That's a tough bug to fix. I use each word in the title and location, minus a list of stop words. There's no intelligence or built-in vocabulary.
  - cperciva 16y ago
    There's no intelligence or built-in vocabulary. Have you tried automatically learning a vocabulary based on seeing which words go together often? I'm thinking e.g., if the word "Block" is followed by the word "Store" more than X% of the time, there should probably be an atomic "Block Store" tag. Hmm, this sounds like a fun puzzle. Can you send me your dataset?
tocomment 16y ago
I'd be interested to apply to the Herndon, VA location but are the interviews really bad? Would I have to study my data structures book before coming in?
jerdfelt 16y ago
I've actually been looking at Amazon recently and found the number of positions available overwhelming. I think I would do well in dozens of the positions posted. I don't know if I should be applying to a bunch of positions to get a better feel of which one is "best" or if I should approach it differently. How would you suggest proceeding when so many positions seem to be relevant?

euroclydon 16y ago

AWS seems to have more open positions than I would imagine they should. What are the turnover/pay/working conditions like there?

jeffbarr 16y ago
I don't have an official turnover figure, but I've been there 8.5 years and counting. As far as working conditions, people show up and they work. We don't have a whole lot of toys or frills at the office. We don't get free food or drinks, but we are paid well and can afford to buy our own. The focus is on meeting customer needs and on shipping stuff that works well and doesn't break as it scales or endures heavy loads. We ship often and run fast (see the AWS blog at http://aws.typepad.com http://aws.typepad.com to get an idea of how fast). Teams are responsible for building and running services, and for fixing them when they break. Many teams measure the number of high-priority tickets generated by their services over the course of a year and set year-over-year goals to drive the number down. As a dev, you might get to carry a pager from time to time, and you will learn to build services that are so robust that they never wake you up :-). We are really happy with the success of AWS to date, and that's why we are hiring. As a new employee you'll be put to work right away on something that is of real and immediate value to the company. You'll learn on the job and you'll get to rub shoulders with really sharp people. Pay is competitive by industry standards and is generally a mix of cash and stock grants. We also have a full suite of benefits.
- euroclydon 16y ago
  Thanks for the great answer! It sounds very professional. I've read most of Steve Yegge's old blog posts, and was always struck by how Amazon's culture is one that values solid technical skills and experience.
  - jeffbarr 16y ago
    You are welcome. Will you be applying?

cperciva 16y ago

There's a bug in your tag cloud: You're splitting on whitespace. The tag "venture capitalists", for example, really isn't the same as the tag "venture" plus the tag "capitalists"...

jeffbarr 16y ago
That's a tough bug to fix. I use each word in the title and location, minus a list of stop words. There's no intelligence or built-in vocabulary.
- cperciva 16y ago
  There's no intelligence or built-in vocabulary. Have you tried automatically learning a vocabulary based on seeing which words go together often? I'm thinking e.g., if the word "Block" is followed by the word "Store" more than X% of the time, there should probably be an atomic "Block Store" tag. Hmm, this sounds like a fun puzzle. Can you send me your dataset?

tocomment 16y ago

I'd be interested to apply to the Herndon, VA location but are the interviews really bad? Would I have to study my data structures book before coming in?

jerdfelt 16y ago

I've actually been looking at Amazon recently and found the number of positions available overwhelming. I think I would do well in dozens of the positions posted. I don't know if I should be applying to a bunch of positions to get a better feel of which one is "best" or if I should approach it differently. How would you suggest proceeding when so many positions seem to be relevant?