employer cover photo
employer logo
employer logo

Amazon Web Services

Part of Amazon

Is this your company?

ProServe: Intentionally Misleading, Poorly Run, Deeply Flawed - Professional Services III Amazon Web Services Employee Review

2.0
24 Sept 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Like anywhere, you'll meet some great and skilled people here. Pay is decent (though it's not hard to find comparable, even from small/mid-sized businesses).

Cons

Management and leadership. It's awful and flat-out dishonest. They'll hire you for expertise, then tell you that your job is to support the sale of AWS services and nothing more. If you're not interested in that pivot, you won't advance and are likely another candidate for the tens of thousands of people they lay off and manage out. And yes, they actively manage people out. It's a fact: they'll hire a coder, tell that coder that their coding expertise is why they're being hired. Once you get the job, they'll change the narrative: if you are primarily interested in writing code, you won't advance to leadership levels (e.g. Level 7). This isn't hearsay, I was told this directly by two L7s. You are forced to pursue certifications that have nothing to do with your job. This is solely to support general corporate certification counts. It has nothing whatsoever to do with aligning skillsets with customer needs. If you fail a certification test, they do not reimburse you, and it is not unusual to be allocated to a project 40 hours a week and be told to get the certification on your own time, without support. The recommended timespan for any of these certifications is 3-6 months, but you are commonly left with a few weeks. Failure to comply is considered a goal failure and compromises your review status. One day leadership will say, "all is well, we have no intention of making any changes or laying people off," a month later they'll do all of it. This is easy to prove (look at Jassy's flip flops). The thing is, it's never "sudden and unavoidable." The statements are made purely to prevent employees for abandoning the sinking ship. HR knew well in advance that AWS would be laying people off, even when we were all told there was no plan to. If you can get the job, good for you. It's not an easy interview loop. But I can't recommend AWS ProServe for anybody other than the person that has lost their taste for working directly with tech and just wants to be another corporate cog.

Explore other reviews about Amazon Web Services

5.0
5 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good Compensation Chance to work on large scale projects

Cons

Promotions are slow Bar is not high across the company

4.0
12 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Operated in systems that had real scale, operational constraints, and production consequences.

Cons

Working at Amazon Web Services gave me strong exposure to distributed systems, operational ownership, and production-scale infrastructure, but there were definitely tradeoffs as well. One downside was that, like many large organizations, ownership could become fragmented. You often own a subsystem or workflow rather than an entire product end-to-end, which can limit exposure to broader architectural decision-making unless you deliberately seek it out. There was also significant process overhead. Design reviews, operational processes, dependency coordination, and organizational alignment were valuable for learning rigor, but they can slow iteration compared to smaller engineering teams. Another challenge is that large internal ecosystems can abstract away infrastructure complexity. AWS has extensive internal tooling, deployment systems, and operational platforms, which are powerful, but some of that experience does not transfer directly outside the company. I also found that operational work could dominate engineering time at points. Handling production issues, retries, integration failures, and on-call responsibilities teaches reliability engineering well, but it can reduce the amount of time spent on deeper technical exploration or greenfield development. Finally, there is the perception aspect. AWS is a strong name, but experienced interviewers know there is wide variance between teams and roles. The company name opens doors, but ultimately you still need to demonstrate technical depth, ownership, and strong engineering judgment independently of the brand.

See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All