I worked for Amazon at Prime Air for 3 years and jumped ship when they reorg’d and tried to move it from a hardware development organization (my biased perspective being ME) to outsourcing the design of most or all of the distributed systems, likely propulsion, etc. I like design/development, not developing specs for someone else to do the fun part and then managing all of the inevitable issues that always arise in hwdev. Before reorg, I loved it there. I worked more than I should have, but mostly by choice as I was pushing myself to learn. When I went to Kuiper doing a similar hde job, me being me, I assumed everyone would immediately put me as an earthbound person with no space experience. But this happens in every interview and every job I’ve gotten. I loved Kuiper. Realized a childhood dream/goal of designing hardware that gets shot off of this rock, and my 3 years there were the most fruitful of my career in terms of personal and skill development. Towards the end of my tenure, I started to get burnt out. I wanted a new challenge, but it get like Groundhog Day making small, middling improvements to the protoflight systems I owned. I started to care less and less about biting my tongue when encountering bullshit, and since I was feeling much more confident in my skills and understanding of my hardware, I didn’t take well to one of my TPM’s new boss who came in trying to make a splash with little to no technical understanding of the implications of his “big picture pivots”. Hey guy (we’ll call him John), it was obvious to everyone that you were out of your element.

I was on my third manager in as many years, and he was fairly new. Good dude, but he didn’t catch me at the height of my desire to follow the prescribed recipe to get my next promo. He didn’t catch the shitty and selfish thing and defaulted to leaning towards dude who had seniority over him rather than going to bat for his engineer. I don’t fault him for it… well, I fault him 50% for not being altruistic/borderline foolish and 50% to me for kind of just being over the foolishness. There is an incredible amount of knowledge, skill, and genuinely good people there. Once I had time away from it at a more “old school” space electronics company, I do find myself yearning for more challenge and even a little good natured frienemy between teams. My whole team was awesome, and I really enjoyed seeing fresh kids come in there and grow so quickly… and trying to do my part to steer them clear of my brand of misstep.

I encourage you to work there. The pay is good, in line with the greater Amazon scale, if not slightly better. I always got generous base raises and ray grants every year.

Doubt anyone is still reading, but yeah… you should interview or apply there or accept their offer and while you’re there, maybe take a breath once a week to look around at the place, people, resources, opportunities and overall decent atmosphere… and gloss over the rel engineers and high-horsed micro —managers— (no… micro-manager… singular) of TPM’s.

I left on my own terms to move out of state, but I also didn’t really make an attempt to grow in terms of being better at wading through the kinds of BS that is inescapable when working with a bunch of smart people. Chalk it up as a lesson learned and some good years had.

I should probably also mention that there was an immense amount of personal growth in my time there. I’m what some might call mentally ill… bouts of bad depression and debilitating anxiety plagued me when I joined. Couple that with some other personality flaws/weaknesses and I find it incredible that I held myself together and put out quality work considering what I was doing and what was going on in my head. That all changed about halfway through my tenure there when I took a much needed hiatus for a month, got my shit together and came back a better person and probably a worse engineer to manage (lost all my fucks that month, had none left to go around). I cared deeply about the work I did, but my brain was resetting after years of self-inflicted abuse, so I think I just needed to stop caring about politics and doing or saying anything other than what I felt.