What is a Principal Engineer at Amazon? With Steve Huynh

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Steve Huynh spent 17 years at Amazon, including four as a Principal Engineer. In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I join Steve in his studio for a deep dive into what the Principal role actually involves, why the path from Senior to Principal is so tough, and how even strong engineers can get stuck. Not because they’re unqualified, but because the bar is exceptionally high.

We discuss what’s expected at the Principal level, the kind of work that matters most, and the trade-offs that come with the title. Steve also shares how Amazon’s internal policies shaped his trajectory, and what made the Principal Engineer community one of the most rewarding parts of his time at the company.

We also go into: 

• Why being promoted from Senior to Principal is one of the hardest jumps in tech

• How Amazon’s freedom of movement policy helped Steve work across multiple teams, from Kindle to Prime Video

• The scale of Amazon: handling 10k–100k+ requests per second and what that means for engineering

• Why latency became a company-wide obsession—and the research that tied it directly to revenue

• Why companies should start with a monolith, and what led Amazon to adopt microservices

• What makes the Principal Engineering community so special 

• Amazon’s culture of learning from its mistakes, including COEs (correction of errors) 

• The pros and cons of the Principal Engineer role

• What Steve loves about the leadership principles at Amazon

• Amazon’s intense writing culture and 6-pager format 

• Why Amazon patents software and what that process looks like

• And much more!

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(01:11) What Steve worked on at Amazon, including Kindle, Prime Video, and payments

(04:38) How Steve was able to work on so many teams at Amazon 

(09:12) An overview of the scale of Amazon and the dependency chain

(16:40) Amazon’s focus on latency and the tradeoffs they make to keep latency low at scale

(26:00) Why companies should start with a monolith 

(26:44) The structure of engineering at Amazon and why Amazon’s Principal is so hard to reach

(30:44) The Principal Engineering community at Amazon

(36:06) The learning benefits of working for a tech giant 

(38:44) Five challenges of being a Principal Engineer at Amazon

(49:50) The types of managing work you have to do as a Principal Engineer 

(51:47) The pros and cons of the Principal Engineer role 

(54:59) What Steve loves about Amazon’s leadership principles

(59:15) Amazon’s intense focus on writing 

(1:01:11) Patents at Amazon 

(1:07:58) Rapid fire round

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

•⁠ Inside Amazon’s engineering culture

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See the transcript and other references from the episode at ⁠⁠https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast⁠⁠

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