That Amazon Life
At the time of writing this I have been working at Amazon Prime Video for 4 years. I have learned a tremendous amount about how great software is built and Amazon has shaped my view on what durable software looks like. I have learned to look beyond the code and at the long term impact of making decisions and the only way I was able to learn this was by making decisions and mistakes that taught me the consequences of my actions firsthand.
There’s a lot not to like about Amazon, the work life balance, deadlines, expectations, processes, red tape, office politics, useless meetings, and performance reviews/stack ranking to name a handful of complaints. But overall there’s a lot that people don’t talk about as much that I have found extremely beneficial to my career. I’ve learned more at this job than 4 years of college by working directly with extremely talented and knowledgable people. There’s something special about being surrounded by a group of people who are all intellectually curious and willing to put in hard work to engineer solutions that really do make me smile or exclaim “ohhh!” I love seeing the side projects that my coworkers work on and the dedication to optimization as a craft. I’m also paid to spend time learning and optimizing my own workflow to speed up my own productivity which fuels my abilities even outside of work.
I revisited a project I had started in college with my newfound system design knowledge and I was able to create something truly magical that would have blown away college Dom. Being able to spin up a complex backend and create a fully end to end durable piece of software is something that does require years of practice and I feel like I gained most of my understanding passively while working at Amazon and attending/hosting design reviews, shipping software, and fixing operational outages (sometimes caused by my own code).
How it started
In Junior year of College at UCSD, I was determined to land a summer internship. I had done an unpaid internship sophomore year of college and I had been grinding LeetCode problems since failing a technical interview at ServiceNow. I received an email over winter vacation that I was in the Amazon interview loop and I needed to complete the Online Assessment (OA). I began taking LeetCode very seriously and doing multiple questions per day in preparation. After Passing the OA, I was asked to do an odd “day in the life simulation” where I had to make choices day to day with some minor coding challenges. After completing this, I had my Amazon Phone Screen with an Engineer who asked me the Graph Valid Tree problem. I gave a satisfactory answer and I was matched with the Watch Party team to join as an Intern.
After developing a successful intern project and presenting a demo to leadership, I was given a return offer to join the Watch Party team after I graduated college.
Death of Watch Party
After a little over a year on the Watch Party team, Amazon hit us with some pretty rough layoffs. Thankfully I kept my job and although Watch Party was turned off, I was moved to Prime Video Marketing Automation which has given me the opportunity to work with larger scale systems and grow into an L5.