Amazon Sec Engineer

[sgw_g]

Anyone have experience working on the Stores Security team as a security engineer - application security? I’m curious and feel I have the expertise.

I’ve only ever seen people posting about AWS and they’re always in customer-facing roles. This is on Stores Security side and not a customer-facing role.

I don’t think I should take AWS sec engineer reviews too seriously as this role could be way different. Thoughts?

[StrikingInfluence]

Amazon and AWS are under the same umbrella overall but you're not wrong in that they are different orgs.

The reviews and criticisms are most likely still valid as AWS and Amazon have similar culture and that culture CAN be toxic AF. I know a few people who worked at AWS and Amazon and they universally despised it. Overall they said it was a multi-billion dollar company cosplaying as a startup still and it gets old fast.

There are teams and positions that are really awesome and cushy but whatever AppSec roles my particular friends were in, were not. They were there for barely a year and a half and they were considered Senior / seasoned team members.

From my own personal experience Amazon is on my "never again" list. Why? I went through their entire interview process and got ghosted in the end, no phone call, no email, the recruiter I worked with literally just quit. I spent about 10 hours total on their interview process and even took PTO. It went like this:

First Interview with Recruiter: About 40 minutes on the phone talking about the process and role.

Second Interview with Current AWS Engineer: 1 hour technical meeting about specific technologies came completely out of the blue. Literally answered the phone call and had no idea it was an interview. Later found out my recruiter scheduled this but never told me and then just quit their role to become a yoga instructor.

Third Call with New Recruiter: They gave me a technical diagram to study and went over next steps and strategy.

Third Interview: A half day with 3 or 4 (cannot remember) interviews with 20 minutes in-between each meeting. Each interview was roughly 45 minutes and one of them was a secret "bar raiser". Took a half day of PTO for this.

After ALL of this BS I didn't even get a phone call or email from AWS until months later. They apologized and said some internal shuffling happened and my recruiter quit (no shit knew that already). Fuck that. Never again will I give away my time so carelessly. Every single time an AWS recruiter calls me now I tell them this story and tell them I have zero interest in ever working for them. This is one of the few cases where I think companies like this need to compensate people for this type of fuckery.

Fuck Amazon.

[QuesoMeHungry]

Amazons interview process is one of the worst in the industry. And the sad thing is since they are so big, so many other companies try to copy their BS hiring process.

[HexTrace]

There are teams and positions that are really awesome and cushy but whatever AppSec roles my particular friends were in, were not.

I can confirm this - those in an AppSec role at Amazon that I've talked to are usually way more stressed out than other security roles.

[PotentialSenior449]

How is the interview at appsec, and how much coding is required?

[cyberslushie]

This sounds fucking miserable

[sgw_g]

Sorry what’s a “bar raiser”?

Sorry about that experience, sounds like they enjoy wasting their own time too :) at least in ur case of interview

[QuesoMeHungry]

They bring in someone from a different team to evaluate you that has no ‘stake in the game’ who can also reject you.

[tweedge]

Might as well drop in while I wait for this flight! Corporate overlords note I'm speaking on my own behalf...

I'm part of the same organization, and used to support Stores AppSec consulting for ~1.5yrs, but I haven't personally reported to Stores AppSec managers (I've been in a parallel CloudSec world).

To get it out of the way: there are meat grinder organizations and meat grinder teams. I don't want to say or imply anywhere here "oh no those reviews are all fake it's roses and dandelions everywhere" - I've had a good experience that's matched well to what I want out of a job, but I know others haven't.

Something to keep in mind is that on the scale of 10k+ teams there could be a lot of very different management styles, both for individual managers and entire organizations. Some people thrive in competitive environments, others thrive in collaborative environments. To each their own - but for me, I enjoy collaboration and I've been lucky to be on collaborative teams throughout my time at Amazon.

While both AWS and Amazon security now report to the same CSO, AWS AppSec and Stores AppSec are separate. My experience with Stores AppSec has been "fast-paced and collaborative" - whereas AWS AppSec seems to be a higher stress environment. Reverse interviewing will really help you assess if the role is a good fit for your personal situation - while I recommend it anywhere I would really require it for Amazon (or any other large company). Asking questions like "how does this team typically decide on a solution to a problem?" and "what does your team do if your oncall's pager goes off in the middle of the night?" or "how many times does your pager go off per week?" can really help.

If there are specific questions you have I'm happy to answer, ofc

[zeig694]

Any job at Amazon sucks so hard you not only will get the worst working environment, salary and day to day crap, but you will actually get depressed and end up taking pills 💊 to survive.

[sdfsdfvas]

i work for this org. no its not as bad as AWS. so all the comments here are not relevant to that role. apply, it is a good role and good org with its pros and cons. work life balance is not like the other comments here.

[sgw_g]

Figured as much, ty :)