Amazon
Amazon.com, Inc. is an American multinational technology company which focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, and much more. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it has been referred to as "one of the most influential economic and cultural forces in the world".
Promotion Overview
| Who Nominates | Manager |
| Who Approves | Committee |
| Frequency | Quarterly for SDE 2 and SDE 3, per half for Principal SDE+ |
| Promotion Rate | Slow |
Promotion Stories
Get notified when Amazon engineers share their stories about how they navigated up the career ladder.Promotion Guide
Requirements
You should be operating at 80%+ of the next level's guidelines to have a real case for your promotion.
You need to write a summary of your work for your promotion packet. The summary needs to include information about the following 5 core scopes of work:
- Scope and influence
- Ambiguity
- Technical complexity
- Execution
- Impact
There is another section where you need to talk about how your work corresponds to Amazon's LPs; however, this section isn't as important as the others.
You need a minimum of 4 peer feedbacks to support your promotion case, but 6+ is recommended.
Documentation requirements
You should always be generating a large paper trail with every project you ship at Amazon. This saves you a lot of time putting together your promotion case as you don't need to write everything from scratch - You can simply compile everything you already have.
The documentation requirements at Amazon are pretty onerous:
- SDE 1 -> SDE 2 promotion takes 5+ pages of documentation.
- SDE 2 -> SDE 3 promotion takes 15+ pages of documentation (!!!).
Rating
You generally need a TT (Top Tier) or HV3 (High Value 3) rating to get promoted.
What Blocks Promotions?
- SDE 1 -> SDE 2 promotions are generally held back because they're lacking in technical complexity.
- SDE 2 -> SDE 3 promotions are generally held back because of lack of scope, influence, and impact.