My First Week at Amazon

Today marks the end of my first week in my new job at Amazon. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a week considering how fast it went by. Felt more like one long day than an entire week. At this point I’m up and running, with two projects already begun. I’m traveling to Southern California next week, then Phoenix a couple weeks later. Both trips are only one night, so that’s nice.

The organization I’m working in is called Amazon Fulfillment Technologies (AFT), and it’s all about creating new technologies to more efficiently fulfill customer orders. One of my new projects is expected to help the company save $40 million in its first full year, so it’s important work that will help me gain a lot of recognition. I found out this week that not only am I the only web developer on my team, which is the Human Centered Design team, but that I am the first web developer in the entire AFT organization! This is a big deal. We have plans to hire more in the future but this means that I will always have seniority in this field and will be looked at as a leader in this category.

One way to exercise leadership as the only web developer will be to take our "Making Great Hiring Decisions Class" in a couple weeks. I’m doing this because my manager wants me to help interview potential web development candidates. This is crazy considering that only a few weeks ago I was one of those candidates, but its a nice vote of confidence they have in me. In addition, I’ve already signed up in the mentorship program, where I will have a mentor that I work with every other week on advanced JavaScript. I’m also getting involved in a variety of the education programs Amazon has, such as the Friday Learning Series, Principal Tech Talks, and special interest groups like FEEM (Front End Engineers Meetup) and WebDevCon, which is a yearly conference put on by my old team that is dedicated strictly to web development.

Amazon has so much to offer in the way of education and career development. I’m definitely planning on taking advantage of these services and doing everything I can to become a leader in the AFT organization. I’m currently ranked as a level 4 web development engineer, which is the highest level of Web Dev 1’s. I should be able to get to level 5 this year, which would make me a Web Dev 2, so that’s my short–term goal. Web Dev 3 is the highest level of web development engineer at Amazon and we currently only have four of them in the company. Obviously this is a long way off but ultimately that will be my goal. This whole new reality is still sinking in and it’s a bit hard to believe. At this point I can confidently say that I found the perfect role for me and will be there for a very long time to come.

Here’s a couple pics from this week. The first is Ava being patient (get it.. patient?) at her checkup. The second is Jasper, one of my new "co–workers" at Amazon.

Ava being patient
Jasper the Husky

One thought on “My First Week at Amazon”

  1. We are very very happy and excited for you and your new career at Amazon. Your dad would be very proud of you. We love you and support you.

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