Experiences at Amazon.com

Network Engineer

At Amazon, I recruit for all levels of technical candidates such as: Software Development Engineers/Architects, Dev Managers, Technical Product and Program Managers and more.

Some of the groups I support consist of: Infrastructure, Dev Tools, Digital Media Technologies, Distributed Systems, Supply Chain, Customer Service Applications, Operations, Ordering and Web Services.

We're hiring in a big way, so please let me know if you or anyone else you know are interested!

Snapshot of some of the things we look for:
C++, Java, Perl, OO (Unix/Linux)
Experience in Distributed Systems

Feel free and contact me at: smits@amazon.com...

Headed a team of six software developers in the design and development of a distributed service, which allowed customers to subscribe to mailing lists of interest that were used by the business for personalized marketing. The service, receiving over five million requests per day.
Transformed real world business requirements into highly optimized relational data models.
Identified and corrected failure conditions that caused unreliability in the Automated Email platform through forensic data analysis, real-time process monitoring, and software instrumentation.
Promoted to Lead Software Developer within 18 months at Amazon.com....

Developer Manager of the Website Efficiency team. In charge of improving the computational efficiency of the platform that generates all website content for Amazon websites. The team built and deployed request routing systems, and distributed client-side caching.
Hired two exceptional software developers in a period of four months, enabling the team to deliver crucial projects. Mentored two newly graduated software developers to help them transition from academia to become productive individual contributors delivering projects within 6 months.
Presented technical talks for Amazon at college recruiting events at University of Austin, Cornell University, and University of Waterloo. Heavily involved in getting new college graduates accustomed to their new environments....

Hired to build technical recruiting organization from scratch. Led 20+ person team of top notch tech recruiters and support staff during ultra-competitive dot com recruiting era. Built process, training, strategy, metrics, and relationships necessary to triple the size of the technology organization....

Developed Amazon's recommendation system, led the Amazon Personalization software team.

Management of the Amazon.com, .ca, .uk, .fr, .de, and .jp design teams responsible for retail store launches, merchandising and promotional design, localized feature integrations, special projects, user interface improvements and general look and feel.

Strategic consulting for feature launches and store improvements, merchandising optimization, brand and holiday strategy development....

Lead infrastructure security team. All aspects of information security including networking, systems, application security, web services, incident handling, acquisition and vendor due diligence, consulting.

Full life-cycle application security, from project conception through to delivery. Incident response, policy definition and enforcement, as well as compliance.

Duties included troubleshooting of software, systems, and shipments; maintaining and patching scripts and tools; handling configuration and deployment of new vendors; and being a main contact for and resolver of trouble tickets relating to operations.