Inside Amazon's Engineering Culture: Lessons from Their Senior Principals
Craft over frills
Last week, Amazon quietly hosted a private open house for senior engineering leaders at its Seattle headquarters. About fifty people gathered to discuss how Amazon makes technical decisions at scale-the kind you don’t hear about in press releases or leadership books.
I didn’t know what to expect, but who would say no to dinner with smart people and deep conversations in the Seattle Spheres?¹
This is my version of a great night out 🥂.
It was a rare glimpse into the senior engineering culture that Jeff Bezos seeded. It still defines the company today.
Three themes stood out:
Purpose: Mission-driven work.
Structure: Clear alignment between titles and roles.
Focus: Craft over perks.
Amazon didn’t ask me to write this. I wanted to capture my thoughts while they’re fresh. If you’ve ever wondered what Amazon’s engineering culture feels like from the inside, this might help.
Purpose: Mission-Driven Work
The space industry is the definition of mission-driven culture.
MiMi Aung, a NASA veteran of thirty years and Director of Technical Program Management for Project Kuiper, gave a presentation I’ll never forget.
She led the development of Ingenuity, the small helicopter that flew on Mars.
She’s one of the most mission-driven people I’ve ever met. You could tell she had hundreds of stories but only fifteen minutes to share them. The world is lucky to have people like her. A three-hour podcast (Lex? Tim? Any takers?) is what we need but don’t yet have.
At one point, I found myself in a circle with a Director from Blue Origin, an engineer from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a Principal SDE from Project Kuiper. It was clear I was among people building the future.
It’s inspiring to live in a time when the private sector—and companies like Amazon—are both willing and able to provide resources so that execution isn’t limited in the short term, while remaining pragmatic enough to demand returns in the long term.²
This reinforced a few ideas I’ve been mulling over. After this event, I can’t let them go. More on that in another post.³
Structure: Clear Alignment Between Titles and Roles
A Senior Principal Engineer is not a Director and not a Vice President.
At a small startup, a CTO might wear many hats: CTO, VP, Director, Principal Engineer, test engineer, even salesperson—depending on the day.
At Amazon, while overlap happens, it isn’t the norm.
A panel with three Senior Principals and one Director made that clear. Some had been at Amazon for more than twenty years; others for only a few. Regardless of tenure, their role clarity was striking.
A Senior Principal Engineer figures out what to do and makes it happen—sometimes by doing it themselves, sometimes by enabling others.
A Director ensures those engineers can do their jobs by securing resources, arranging meetings, and clearing obstacles. “I got you,” as one said.
A Vice President focuses on direction and one-way decisions. They gather input but don’t decide by committee. They decide as individuals.
The topic of one-way doors fascinated me. These are decisions that can’t be undone. They require a mix of experience, intuition, optimism, and authority.
I asked for examples after the session, and their answers stuck with me.
From my own startup experience, one-way decisions have included irreversible team changes, choosing frameworks that define future ecosystem alignment, and setting immovable timelines.
When I asked a VP at Amazon for their examples, they mentioned:
Leadership hires – A bad hire can quietly poison a culture.
Product selection – Shutting down a product can disband entire organizations.
Letting go of a customer – Once you deprioritize a customer, that trust may never return.
My takeaway from that conversation:
One-way doors require top-down decisions. Reversible decisions should come from bottom-up ownership.
Amazon’s rule of thumb: reversible decisions move fast; one-way doors move slow.
Focus: Craft Over Perks
Amazon remains obsessed with customers and craft—not perks.
Amazon’s founding team built the culture, but it has outlived those who created it. There’s something powerful about seeing that endurance firsthand.
On my drive home, I reflected on what was said—and what wasn’t. There was no talk of lunches, gyms, benefits, or flexible hours. The word balance never came up.
There was only talk of customer obsession and solving problems at scale—imagining the biggest problem possible, then multiplying it by ten. Of being surrounded by hardworking, intelligent peers doing their best work.
I pressed with a few questions during the panel. Every Amazonian there truly embodied the company’s values. It’s why some have spent their entire careers there, and why others have left only to return.
At Amazon, customer obsession isn’t just a value—it’s a constraint on every technical tradeoff.
The Open House Event
The event itself was meticulously organized. It struck the right balance of talks, panels, Q&A, and breaks. We’ve all been to events so packed they’re exhausting; this one wasn’t.
The guest-to-Amazonian ratio felt perfect. I’d estimate thirty-five attendees and fifteen Amazonians. It was intimate enough to meet everyone yet lively enough to stay energetic.
I learned what it was like to work at Amazon in 2000, what onboarding feels like in 2025, and spoke with engineering leaders spanning industries from space to biotech.
So What Do I Think?
Mostly, I’m just grateful—for the people I met, the conversations I had, and the ideas I left with.
I’m on my own entrepreneurial journey, and I’d love to create the kind of Principal Engineering community that Amazon has.
If you’re a Principal+ Software Engineer, I highly recommend reaching out to their recruiting team. No frills, no fluff, no games—just a chance to speak with some of the smartest people in the industry.
For all Amazon’s scale, its success still rests on three primitives: curiosity, clarity, and execution. Everything else—AI, perks, org charts—is scaffolding.
Culture endures when decisions, not slogans, carry it forward.
Written after attending Amazon’s October 2025 Engineering Open House in Seattle.
[1] I like to call the Amazon Spheres “Bezos’ Balls.” To build a company as big as Amazon, you need some big ones—and two isn’t enough. 🙃
[2] Speaking of the space industry in the private sector, one of my friend’s is building Canada’s sovereign launch capabilities at NordSpace and its inspiring to see things coming to fruition.
[3] As a software-first individual, I test and use the latest and greatest AI tools on a daily basis. I’ve been using GitHub Copilot since 2021 and can’t imagine working without my ChatGPT or Claude subscriptions. I asked engineers across Amazon, NASA, and Blue Origin about their AI experiences. Many on the ground floor in “real engineering” disciplines are still slow to adopt these tools. The opportunity here is massive—it’s only a matter of time. I’ll save the details for another post, but now I have a goal: to earn a spot at the MARS Conference.
This article pretends it's about engineering culture, but is essentially a love letter to Amazon's corporate culture -- which is by nearly all accounts, pretty terrible. I guess the tone-deafness (Amazon announced up to 30K layoffs today) should be expected from someone willing to post such a sycophantic piece of fluff.
Total garbage article.