It sounds like you turned down Amazon, which was likely an excellent decision. (Full disclosure: I work at an Amazon competitor and I routinely hire Amazon ref

It sounds like you turned down Amazon, which was likely an excellent decision. (Full disclosure: I work at an Amazon competitor and I routinely hire Amazon refugees.) Amazon is (from my perspective) an environment that does not value the individual: their engineers are not permitted to blog or otherwise describe their work -- and participating in an open source project is so outside their culture that no one dare even ask the question. The good news: Amazon is the exception, not the rule. Other environments (large and small) empower the individual -- and I think that that is the essence of what you're looking for. So the questions to ask: will I be allowed to reasonably discuss my work at conferences, in blogs, etc.? Will I get the opportunity to work on open source projects? Will I get the opportunity to open source original work I develop here? If the answer to those is a verifiable "yes", you are likely headed to a generally supportive environment (be it established company or startup); in software engineering (as in government) sunlight tends to disinfect...