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Position: SDE III Tenure: almost 1 year Job level: 6 Base Pay: $150000 Signing bonus $50k year 1, $40k year 2 Stock: 450 shares, spread over 4 years, 5%/15%/40%/40% No promotions or reviews yet Gender: M Native English Speaker: Yes Location: Seattle


I'm a TPM III, 10 year experience in consulting before coming to Amazon, former developer and dev lead. Been at Amazon 18 months.

Base is $145k. Signing bonus $50k year 1, $40k year 2. Stock 350 shares over 4 years. 5%/15%/40%/40% No promotions or reviews yet.

In summary: about $200k total comp first two years, from then on variable based on stock. I expect about $225 to $250k in 2016.


Wow, nice. Is Level 6 pretty high? What was your experience coming into the job?


Level 6 is a senior engineer. Roughly 90th percentile of engineers. We have principal engineers, but not a lot of them.

I had 15+ years of experience before coming here.


So, to put things in perspective, Google TechLevel-5, which is "Senior Software Engineer" which is basically 1 level above Amazon's "SDE III" position.

Competitive pay offer: $180k /year $50k signing bonus 15% bonus per year 800 RSUs vested equally over 4 years (200/year) 600 RSUs vested in 100-chunks every quarter for the first 18 months.

Counting up, in the first 12 months, pay is about $670,000.

I gotta get seriously bumped at the end of 18 months to keep it up, otherwise my pay will slip to $350,000.

And that is what a competitive offer from a company that values their employees looks like.

I have friends who have totally gotten the $1m RSUs/year for 4 year offers from both Google, Facebook and others. These positions exist.

It helps to change jobs a bunch :-)


holy cow- and people still leave to do startups? They must be really crazy.


Do you mean that's 800 RSUs overall or 800+600=1400 RSUs over 4 years?


it's 800 over 4 years, and 600 over 18 months. So 1400 total.


Good to know. Thanks!


It's senior sde level. Not everyone is expected to make senior, and they only have something like 10-15% at that level or higher.




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