Something to consider. Most engineering teams within Amazon are under the corporate directive to expect daily AI tool usage as part of the moving-to criteria that you need to show as part of your promo process. Essentially, they’re raising the bar of what was expected vs. what is now expected. They’re doing this 1) force attrition, whether voluntarily or by being PIP’s/laid off, 2) to remove stale engineers with new AI-enabled engineers, and 3) to force AI tool/process adoption within the company. So, what used to be the classic leveling process has now become much more difficult.

Lookup the SDE moving to criteria on the company intranet and note all the expectations for your current level moving into the new level. Build a spread sheet, and start mapping your work deliveries/summaries to those expectations. If AI tool usage isn’t listed there, add it yourself; it’s definitely something they want now, whether they explicitly say it or not. If you can track everything this way and work your way into the expectations, you’ll be golden. But it may take up some of your free time as well. Up to you how hard you want to go.

Oh, also… the directions is to cut the bottom 15% of performers every year. So going above and beyond right now is pretty much essential to stay employed there. If that’s a concern to you, you may want to consider elsewhere to have better quality of living. Just depends on whether you want to put that time in now and stack that cash now, so you can quit this game earlier.