What does Amazon pay its technologists?
That’s a key question, especially as the e-commerce conglomerate finds itself locked in a fierce battle for talent with other tech giants. Over the past few months, Amazon has boosted the maximum base salary for its technologists and office workers to $350,000, in addition to reportedly giving employees record amounts of stock.
For an answer, we’re turning to levels.fyi, which crowdsources compensation data from multiple technology companies. Although crowdsourcing isn’t always the most scientific way of determining salaries, the levels.fyi compensation ranges generally tend to align with those presented by other sources, such as Glassdoor.
For the purposes of this analysis, we focused on entry-level positions, specifically software engineers, product designers, product managers, and software dev managers. Here are the results:
As with any technology job at any company, base salary is important—but stock is where things really get interesting. Entry-level roles for managerial positions can potentially earn a lot of stock scheduled to vest during a certain multi-year period, and if the company does well during that time, it can translate into significant overall compensation. While Amazon’s decision to boost maximum salaries won’t impact many workers just starting out, the increased stock grants could make a major difference—provided those employees stick around, of course.
Amazon pay for entry-level technologists is also roughly equivalent to what you’d find at other tech giants. Will the company try to further differentiate itself through future stock and salary boosts? That’s an open question, although an internal company post from February 2022, reviewed by GeekWire, suggested that Amazon is indeed concerned about retention: “This past year has seen a particularly competitive labor market and in doing a thorough analysis of various options, weighing the economics of our business and the need to remain competitive for attracting and retaining top talent, we decided to make meaningfully bigger increases to our compensation levels than we do in a typical year.”
If you’re interested in working for Amazon, the company often posts jobs that require mastery of software development, Java, Amazon Web Services (AWS), C++ and Python. As with other tech giants, the interview process involves phone screens and technical tests—check out this interesting breakdown from an Amazon hiring manager.
