Software Development Engineer

Introduction

I worked as a software development engineer for Amazon for three years, starting as an intern in summer 2020 and returning full time as a Software Development Engineer I in 2021. I was promoted to Software Developer Engineer II in October 2023, and I left to pursue my MBA in summer 2024.

I was a part of Prime Air, Amazon's drone delivery system, where my team owned a full-stack asset management platform. This was used to track all of Prime Air's drones, batteries, and support equipment, making sure that everything was accounted for and in working order.

Transitioning from Coder to Builder

When I started, I was right out of college and would consider myself a coder. I knew how to code and I liked writing code, but I was a task-taker, working on whatever I was told to do.

Two experiences I had at Amazon drastically changed my perspective.

First, I took ownership of a project for the first time. As an internal tool, we didn't have robust UX/UI support, and in partnership with my PM I was able to help define the user experience. I then worked with fellow engineers to create a technical design, which I later implemented. I felt an incredible sense of ownership over my project and, increasingly, my team's product as a whole.

Second, I spent a couple days alongside our customers, getting to know them and how they used our software. I thought I understood them, but when I saw them actually using the software, everything clicked. While I knew that our work as engineers was important, I felt like the technical decisions we made were far less interesting to me than the user experience decisions made by our PM, and I started doing my work thinking heavily about my customers.

These experiences kickstarted my journey from being a coder (who, as I'm defining it, cares primarily about coding) into a builder (who feels ownership for the product and cares about creating something genuinely useful).

Putting It to the Test

As I grew from a coder into a builder, I took on more responsibility in my team. I started owning larger projects, training new team members, and representing my team in cross-functional meetings. I made decisions based on how it would impact our customers first and foremost.

The true test of this growth came in January 2024, when five members of our seven-person team (including my manager) transferred to other departments within Amazon. This was the beginning of an important year with mission-critical projects, and suddenly my team consisted of me, a junior engineer, another senior engineer from our sister team, and a new manager. Over the next several months we brought on two more junior engineers (both of whom had been interns elsewhere in Amazon the summer before). Suddenly, I found myself juggling an every-other-week on-call rotation with trying to bring four people up to speed while also trying to keep our deadlines from slipping.

The first thing I did was jump onto the most mission-critical project. It had recently been estimated that my team's part in the project would take seven months, which was much longer than we were expecting. I started attending a weekly cross-functional sync with members of other teams that were working on this project, and after discussing some trade-offs with them I re-architected a plan that reduced our development time from seven months to two months.

I then worked with my manager to evaluate which projects on the roadmap were not mission-critical. I made sure the documentation was clear and up-to-date on those projects, and then we paused them.

Finally, I met for one hour each day with the new members of my team to share everything I could about our product. I recorded these meetings and uploaded them to a shared location, where they could be shown to future teammates. Before any of this had started, I had been accepted into an MBA program, and my team knew that I would be leaving in the summer. This was meant to be enduring reference material for the team.

As a result of these efforts, we finished our high-priority project before the deadline, and our other projects (that hadn't been paused) were on-track. The new teammates were growing into their roles quickly, and were strong, contributing members before I left for my MBA program.