Lower/mid Amazon engineer is more like 120-150k assuming in the USA, less in their other countries of operations. Not that different for the other tech giants. You might be getting some stock options that help offsetting the fact they can’t afford a house and have crappy traffic. But there is a decently large pool of machine learning graduates that you could get with 70-90k “post doc” internships and or 100k jobs. You don’t need mid six figure to get someone to train some raid bosses. (Unless by mid 6 you mean 150k and not 500k which apparently is a thing according to google searching)
I'm talking 500K for the people who are doing the machine-learning processing behind Alexa and the customized targeted marketing services they sell B2B, which is now machine-learning based. The interns work on the storefront and streaming, which is complicated enough by itself. The mid-tier people are doing the cloud computing and inventory management services. I have no idea what they're paying the in-house game studio people, but Smed works there now, so go figure. I grew up in Seattle and spent my entire IT career in that corridor. Amazon is a completely different beast than 10 years ago, its software development organization is probably bigger than Microsoft now. It's a race to see who has how many buildings.
