Experiences at Amazon.com

In my case, the secret was to start at the bottom. My first job was as a temporary employee answering the phone--you know, "Thank you for calling Amazon.com, how may I direct your call?"

In my recent jobs, I've been very involved in the hiring process for my team, my department and other groups at Amazon. The secret to getting a technical job at Amazon is easy: know your stuff. We're going to ask you about algorithms, data structures and data models, and we're going to make you write code on the spot to solve a significant problem. We want to know if your solution will scale, and we want to ensure that you've thought about testing and stability.

For non-technical jobs, like program management, the secret is to demonstrate that you can approach a problem from a creative perspective and solve it using technology or in a similarly cost-effective manner....

Technical competence and a willingness to multi-task.

Work collaboratively with other designers and take direction to meet creative and business objectives. Design visual merchandising concepts for both business and technology owners, with emphasis on product development. Track metrics and plan with current trends to meet core business objectives through great interactive design. Develop web pages, including banners, icons, buttons, illustrations, templates, and other print/web materials. Creation and manipulation of web graphics optimized for palette, size, and speed of download.
*Developed an entire library of high profile associates web graphics and online advertisements, which are displayed on AOL, MSN, Prodigy and Earthlink.
*Created new shopping carts and e-commerce solutions for specific Amazon.com clients.
*Completed Amazon.com's course in site usability and attended Jakob Nielsen UI seminar....

Confidence in your abilities and selling yourself in an interview. Additionally, having questions prepared that express your interest in the position you're applying for will make a favorable impression

Referrals!

* Assist with New Hire Training
* Monitor associate calls and email responses to maintain quality
* Coach associates on phone presentation and accuracy
* Analyze pending orders to determine risk, while remaining focused on a positive customer experience
* Utilize multiple technical programs, including Unix, Microsoft Office and proprietary programs
* Interact with financial institutions and customers to confirm authorized purchases and credit card information...

Early on there was a lot of utility infielding: database work, Perl/C++ debugging/development, emergency scaling. Later on I stabilized around supply chain logistics, designing backend and customer-facing applications and implementing them in C++ and Perl.

* Built and managed engineering and customer experience innovation team which defined, built, and launched high-profile strategic projects. Major projects included Amazon Tribeca Short Film Competition, Amazon 10th Anniversary Experience, Amazon Non-Profit Innovation Contest, and much more.
* Explored and built key strategic partnerships for Amazon.com, spanning a breadth of areas from product development and corporate sponsorship alliances, to marketing, public relations, ecommerce platform partnerships, and celebrity talent joint ventures.
* Explored new business opportunities to grow revenues and increase global awareness of Amazon.com....

When I first started at Amazon.com, I was an engineer in the Network Tools and Analysis team. I started as

a Network Engineer I, and quickly (within three months of being hired) moved up to Network Engineer II with

project lead responsibilities.I worked with HP OpenView, MicroMuse Netcool, all Cisco software suites, and

freeware tools such as MRTG and RRDTool. I was project lead for all of our in house (Perl) monitoring

software applications including traffic graphing, network latency reports, alarm generation for on call

engineers, WAN circuit monitoring, and even uptime monitoring of our monitoring software. After 6 months

of employment, I was given the authority to prioritize my projects without intervention from management. I

was also given the freedom to create and prioritize new projects at my discrecion. I was also promoted to

project lead and delegated work load for my projects to our team of network tools engineers.I gained much

experience with Cisco products including all series of routers, switches, WAN switches (IGX/BPX), PIX

firewalls, LocalDirectors and Distributed Directors. I worked very closely with Cisco product

representatives, software engineers, development engineers and network engineers to drive their development

of their software and hardware to meet our requirements and unique needs. I participated in our on-call

rotation, providing tier 2 support of our global network including all network related hardware and

software. I was later promoted to the tier 3 support oncall team. This was an honor for me as all other

engineers in this group were senior network architects.One of the greatest skills I learned at Amazon was

the ability troubleshoot any networking related problem, many which had never previously been discovered in

the technical community. As a result of my oncall experiences, I voulunteered for the responsiblity of

driving vendor product development and bug fixes. Many times I was required to engineer work arounds when

the vendor could not provide a satisfactory solution or time to resolution. I also furthered my experience

with OSPF and BGP routing protocols....

I'm proud to have worked at the world's largest online retailer. As a senior engineer in
the Network Architecture team, I was exposed to the cutting edge of computer networking.

Notable experiences include:

Lead architect for network monitoring and analysis projects

I wrote much of the software we used to monitor our global network. Created a network database
to track all equipment and provide a source of record for other monitoring tools. Regularly
wrote custom software to integrate existing monitoring software. Wrote graphing software to
display data about network metrics gathered by a collection agent I wrote. The agent was modular
to allow for any arbitrary collection module to be integrated, and I wrote the SNMP and automated
login module for the collector.

Actively involved in data center network designs

I was involved in creating standards and repeatable designs for rapid data center deployment.
Contributions to this project included IP allocation standards, device configuration standardization,
automation of monitoring for newly deployed equiment, and procedural documentation for datacenter
technicians who deployed new equipment.

Lead architect for all remote site VPN/WAN networks

Soley responsible for network design for all remote sites including remote offices, distribution
centers and customer service centers. Managed timelines and resources across multiple groups to
ensure timelines were met for our extremely aggressive schedule. Deployed over 50 remote sites in
one calendar year, which would not have been feasible without standardization I introduced.

Responsible for subnet assignment and management

I was solely responsible for all IP space at Amazon.com, and wrote software to manage both current
subnets and new allocations. The application would also monitor which subnets were found in router
forwarding tables and would display the information accordingly.

Administration of network monitoring servers (Unix and Windows)

I was our system administrator for our monitoring servers. Most servers were Linux or Solaris, but
a few were regretably running Windows.

At Amazon.com I was exposed to nearly all models of Cisco network equipment. I regularly evaluated yet-to-be-released equipment from various vendors, and provided buying descision guidance. I had daily interaction with load balancers, routers, switches, and firewalls....