Apple QE or Amazon SDE intern?
first, just want to emphasis what a problem this is to have and so so so grateful everything turned out well. been applying since last october and had 2 other offers (faang adjacent) that got rescinded because of f1 visa status - so if anyone is reading this PLEASE DON'T GIVE UP!! esp if ur international like it's possible :)) also open to DMs if anyone needs encouragement!
context: sophomore at t4 cs school, international (on f1 visa) so i can't defer amazon to fall bc im not sure if i can work 40 hours/week during the semester.
offer 1: Apple QE intern (IS&T, sales engineering)
pros:
- $47/hour, $3.3K/month housing stipend, Sunnyvale CA
- apple brand + internal access
- better WLB
- mainly building ai agent workflows for automation + LLM eval models (infra + deployment)
cons:
- heard ppl who go into QE get "pigeonholed" to that role and makes it harder for them to pivot to swe later on
- conversion to swe unclear
offer 2: Amazon Robotics SDE intern
pros:
- $57/hour, $2.9K/month housing stipend, Greater Seattle
- sde title, clear swe work (which i wanna do more in the future)
- likely more coding/systems work
cons:
- would be reneging apple (apple basically gave me one day to accept their offer bc their hiring szn was pretty much closed)
- not the best wlb
right now i’m leaning toward apple mainly because i do want to end up at apple swe long term + the internal access/networking seems really valuable, and also i’m coming off a pretty intense recruiting cycle so wlb does matter a bit. but i’m pretty worried about the QE → SWE transition and whether taking amazon SDE would just make things much more straightforward for future swe recruiting (including apple).
any advice would be appreciated,, or if there are any f1 students here who were able to work on co-ops during the semester (either thru cpt or pre completion opt) pls lmk!