wde-sde

I think I negotiated poorly and only ended up with about $97k total compensation in my first year, and by my third year it was about $120k.

The stock seemed like a mind-game to me, but it did work out to about 10% YoY increases in total compensation.

It's also inaccurate to characterize the stock as a one-time grant. The initial grant vests over four years (weighted on the last two years) typically you receive more grants after performance reviews, which vest over two years (again weighted on the second year.)

So in practice, you get a grant of 200 shares at signing, but by the end of year two only 50 have vested. At that point you have at least one performance grant, so you're probably getting shares vesting pretty regularly, at least four times a year.

I was hired as a "Web Development Engineer I" several years ago (level 4). My base compensation was virtually identical to yours, but my signing bonus and base pay were a little less than half. Stock grants were also very similar at hire. After a couple years my job role changed to SDE, I remained level 4 and was given a better than 10% raise.

In my fourth year my total compensation was estimated to be around 120k.

It's worth looking at the H1B data. I've got some limited anecdotal data, but the H1B data appears to clearly delineate the same salary ranges Amazon gives to US Citizens. (Maybe they will pay citizens 10% more, but the ranges actually look pretty similar to what I've heard.)

http://h1bdata.info/

(I am a US Citizen, English speaker, in Seattle.)

Main moral of the story if you choose to stay at Amazon: don't worry about your level, focus on your job role. You can probably keep doing the work you're doing and become an SDE if you talk to your manager and frame the conversation right.

I think it's true that the different engineering roles do similar work but the SDEs are paid better. This is why most people I know (including myself) who started as non-SDEs chose to first convince their manager to switch job roles.

Personally, this netted me a 10% base pay increase. More counting the performance stock bonus that came with the change.