After 6 years at Amazon, in the second half of 2025, I realised that I no longer want to fight for another promotion at Amazon. By staying for another year at Amazon in an attempt to get promoted to Principal Engineer, I would miss out on an opportunity to grow as a software engineer in the direction I want. So I decided to leave Amazon instead.

Leaving Amazon was a hard decision and, as a typical Amazonian, I wrote a document trying to help myself to make that decision. I decided to share this document publicly, hoping it will help others facing similar career choices.

Opinions expressed are solely my own

My Amazon Job History

I joined Amazon when I was 23 yo, as SDE I (~ junior dev) in Edinburgh. I joined an internal data platform team within People eXperience Technology organisation. I spent three years within this team, leading two large projects. I learnt a lot about AWS, Lambda Functions, Data Platforms and even managed to do a public talk on the project I led.

Those two projects led to my promotion to SDE II in 2022 and in 2023 to SDE III (Senior Software Engineer).

In 2023 I joined Prime Video team in London. London is one of the largest tech hubs of Prime Video (around 700 engineers) with VP and some tech leadership presence. I transferred to Prime Video with the goal of gaining exposure to operational best practices, challenges that come with scale, and getting more real “Amazon” experience, understanding how mature, large, complex products like Prime Video are maintained and developed. I joined a backend team owning Playback Authorization and several Tier-1 services.

I am very grateful for my time at Amazon. I met a lot of talented people, some of whom I became really close friends with. The experience at Amazon helped me grow not just technically, but also improve my skills in leadership. I learnt how to operate and lead projects in large organisations, how estimation works for large projects (see Sean’s blogpost), what problems to focus on when everything seemed broken and of course how to write documents.

Where do I want to be in 3-5 years?

Before making my next move, I had to ask myself what I want to do in 3-5 years. For me the answer was (and still is) that I want to continue building software, learning more about software, technologies, owning and solving customer problems. There are a lot of technologies, architectures and problems I am curious about but have not had time to learn yet at Amazon (think relational & columnar databases, Kubernetes, real-time streaming etc). I understood that I genuinely enjoy the software engineer job and want to continue learning and growing as a software engineer. Recent developments in AI/Agentic Coding only fuelled my passion and interest (e.g. Do not become an Engineer Manager).

For a while at Amazon I believed that the only way to grow in tech in both skills and compensation is to stay in a big tech corporation and climb the ladder. However, I realised that Amazon’s vision of a software engineer no longer matched mine. And what’s more, the Amazon environment slows down my growth.

Why Amazon does not fit my vision for software engineer growth

Beyond SDE II growth at Amazon is about political skills rather than technical ones.

The next step for me as Senior Software Engineer (SDE III) at Amazon would be getting promoted to Principal Engineer (SDE IV). Growing to this next level is less about your technical skills and more about navigating the organisation, dealing with internal politics and how you build alignment around initiatives. This is true for most large organizations. Even to be a “top performer” SDE III you end up spending a lot of time building alignment with other teams rather than building software. Those political/organisational/leadership skills are important and tough to master, but I realised that it’s not what I want to do in my 20s.

Small piece of ownership

Being a cog in a big-tech company means that you own a small portion of the domain and you get less exposure to new types of problems. In large orgs like Prime Video, it also meant that you are distanced from the customers, their problems and even Product Managers.

Slow pace of software development slows down my personal growth

Feedback on the decisions you make usually arrives once the software has been in production through a certain scale and several iterations. However, when most time on the project is spent on “alignment” across 10s of teams and services - everything takes longer. A feature a small team could build in weeks takes Amazon months, with improvements and tech debt resolution usually postponed to the following year. Making any systematic changes turns into multi-year projects, which are either discouraged due to high cost or even if completed, arrive way too late.

There is a world outside of Amazon

I believe that to grow as a professional, there should be a healthy balance between changing environments from time to time to get exposure to new problems (learning horizontally) and sticking long enough with a single domain / problem (learning vertically). Amazon’s solution to this - an internal transfer within Amazon - does not provide the same learning opportunity as joining another company.

Amazon is popular for its two-pizza team concept, encouraging teams to own as much of software lifecycle as possible, define their own culture etc. However, in reality there are a lot of company-wide policies and structures that shape how a team at Amazon operates. Most teams at Amazon were built around service-oriented architecture, followed the Amazon-wide role/level guidelines and promotion process, and organised their time around company-wide rituals such as yearly planning and the famous leadership principles. Technologies are usually constrained to a subset of AWS services, with a bunch of standardized internal tools/frameworks that fall below industry standards.

So even after I changed organisations from HR to Prime Video, I still found myself operating in the similar “Amazon” culture, limited by the same Amazon-specific systemic issues, using the same technology (Java, Kotlin, AWS) and falling behind new tooling innovations in the industry. For example, tools like Copilot, then Cursor and then Claude Code were not available at Amazon.

Potential impact of leaving Amazon on my career

After exploring the job market, talking more to my friends working in start-ups, I believe there is an alternative to big tech - smaller but efficient teams can achieve significant success in business, especially with AI productivity-boost and lack of corporation guardrails.

But before deciding to leave I also wanted to consider what I would miss out on:

  1. Continuing to grow leadership and organisational skills
  2. Opportunity to solve or move the needle on large organisational problems
  3. Access to Amazon Network.
  4. Potential promotion to Principal Engineer, while not a priority for me at the moment, still a good career achievement

This trade-off seems acceptable to me because (a) at the stage of my life I value technical growth more, assuming that I will get back to leadership later (b) I got enough exposure to leadership challenges within Amazon (c) I do not want to play the role of Principal Engineer for now.

My next step - joining Wiz

I have interviewed at several companies, starting from series A/B/C start-ups and larger companies like Wise, Meta, Jane Street. With around 50 applications I succeeded in getting a role at Wiz, where I started this January. Wiz is a much smaller company (200+ engineers) with entirely different processes, architecture, culture. I am excited and curious what my new role brings and what I will learn this year. I will try to share as much as possible with you in this blog. Stay tuned!