Pros
I worked for AWS Professional Services, the consulting arm of Amazon Web Services. * AWS invests a LOT in your education. 6 weeks of just onboarding, including AWS paying for certification training classes and certification exames * Access to internal AWS accounts makes it easy to experiment and learn * My coworkers were brilliant, and I learned a lot from them * Access to unique customer challenges and datasets * Pay was great, 30% higher than what I was making in my previous job * For a while, some of the travel is great. I got to visit a few cities around the U.S. and even travel internationally * Work-life balanced is manageable. Could be a lot better if there weren't so many time-sucking unnecessary internal processes, but it's not nearly as bad as Amazon's reputation if you google "Amazon work-life balance"
Kontras
* Amazon is enormous, and as bureaucratic as you'd guess based on that size. I probably bookmarked 200 well-meaning internal sites / tools my first week. * Gender diversity was awful on my team. I think it was something like 80 employees, 3 women. * Travel in AWS Professional Services is a lot more manageable than at management consultancies, but it can still wear you down. I'd say on average I got about 10 days notice before traveling * Internal communication tools are awful. You have to use Amazon-created, kind-of-ok alternatives to the stack you'd use at a modern company. e.g. Amazon Chime instead of Slack, Microsoft Outlook instead of Google Calendar, etc.