There are jokes about "retiring to retail" among more senior engineers in AWS. There are a lot of older low-activity codebases where the pace is slower and someone senior can essentially retire-in-place. There's also a massive diversity of teams in retail. But yea, as far as I can tell most everyone would rather work in AWS, and nobody in AWS seems to seriously consider the possibility of transferring to a team in retail.
Edit: Missed the part about permissions, that's totally possible, but at least in publicly visible contributions, he is way behind his teammates.