Ex Amazon here. Amazon has some solid principles that often go against popular belief.

- No waterfall-ish process where design is handed down from architects to senior engineers to juniors. The same people do design, implementation, ops and so on.

- Measure everything and always. People are encouraged to define metrics and goals and create dashboards before writing code

- Simplify: decreasing complexity is taken more seriously than in other companies. Do not use a database when you can use a file, or a message passing library when you can use a socket, or 200 lines of code when you can for out to "grep | sort". This can be surprising to new hires.