Red Badge of Nurdage
Hard to believe I’ve been at AWS for 10 years! I picked up my red badge when it came in at reception (a little early) this week. This big work anniversary is a natural time to reflect on what’s changed and what’s stayed the same about my work over the past decade.
Beginning
I arrived for my orientation as a newly-minted SDEII on August 1st, 2016 having only worked one other job as an adult. I had a brief moment of panic when I found out the hiring manager had left Amazon the week before and it wasn’t clear if our brand new team would still be a thing. As it turned out I needn’t have worried!
Over the next year plus I learned a lot. I resurrected my Java knowledge from college (after years in the C++ mines) and started learning Scala (my first functional language since Scheme) and the ins and outs of big data processing with Apache Spark. I got used to working on a larger development team working on a production codebase. (One of my very first projects was to define some of our team code style guidelines.) I commented on a lot of code reviews. I also started to pick up more about security use cases, an area in which I had almost no expertise, having working in NLP for so long.
We launched our service, Amazon GuardDuty, at re:Invent 2017 and I started carrying a pager as part of an oncall rotation. (Waking up in the middle of the night certainly motivates you to stabilize your code!) I mostly continued optimizing and extending our various log processing systems.
After a few years our teams moved from the 10th floor of Port 99 (no longer an Amazon building) kitty corner to Blackfoot, sitting on the fifth floor. That was nice because I could use the stairs to enter every day without waiting for an elevator.
As our team grew I switched managers a few times. I got the chance to work more with our Principal Engineer and got an idea of where I would want my career to go. In October 2019 I was promoted to SDEIII as I found my lane as a Spark expert and teacher, and with a continued interest operational excellence.
Remote
Like the rest of my team I suddenly found myself working from home in March 2020. What I thought would be a few weeks turned into over three years of remote work until 3-day RTO in May 2023. Thankfully our townhouse had a third room that could be my home office during this time. I borrowed an office chair and the work continued. Working from home was nice because I felt safe in an uncertain time and it meant more time with family, especially that first year when Kindergarten was abruptly cancelled and 1st Grade was remote until the spring.
I built a lot of our first new protection plan for S3 buckets in 2020, a natural extension of my previous work with CloudTrail data. I got to work more closely with our product team and security engineers and lead the small team that delivered it. There was a lot of code to write of course, but I also had to learn a lot about writing design documents and working closely with other teams to get our integrations working.
By this time I had also participated in over 200 interviews, which is another very different skill to develop. Sometimes it feels weird to evaluate a candidate but I got pretty good at it; you learn a lot by probing into how someone else works. I had done a handful of phone screens in my previous job but the hiring scale was nothing compared to our growing teams at Amazon during the WFH era.
Runtime
Around this time I shifted into more of a tech lead role, with less and less time coding and more time mentoring and building engineering teams. Along with many others I helped lead the launch of the GuardDuty agent for EKS Runtime Monitoring, and learned a ton about new-to-me technologies like eBPF. I also got much deeper knowledge into all of the authorization work needed to make an agent running in a customer environment connect easily to our backend for data analysis. We later expanded this agent to cover ECS and EC2. I learned a lot more about owning the technical aspects of a project with many teams including those from other services. In many ways our technical problems are easier than the people and organizational ones!
We returned to office, first 3 days a week, and then full time. It was a big change! There’s a lot to love about remote work, including the extra time with family, even with my relatively short bus commute. At the same time I have found there to be more spontaneous collaboration in the office, and I of course enjoy chatting with my peers. Much of the time I am working with people in other time zones so I’m on video calls anyway, hiding in a phone booth away from my desk. As I’ve said in the past, we should be able to support a variety of work arrangements!
Somewhere in here Blackfoot’s lobby finished getting renovated and my team moved up to the 34th floor, which provided a balcony and stunning views. I post pictures from here from time to time.
I also became the keeper of our high level architecture diagram which was getting referenced in a lot of places. There’s something that really appeals to me about laying out a flowchart just so.
Principal
In October 2023 I was promoted to Principal Engineer, which was a very nice recognition as well as being one of my primary career goals. Of the Principal Tenets the one that appeals to me the most naturally is Leads With Empathy; it extends nicely from my favorite Leadership Principle, Earn Trust.
https://youtu.be/SD5GB_6pGOg?is=KoHtGMJVIMBMHGQq
In some ways not much changed for me as a technical leader; my portfolio of teams shifted a bit to include more of GuardDuty’s frontend. I spent more time thinking about long term architectural improvements we might need. I think the biggest change was getting access to the Principal community at Amazon, where there are so many amazing engineers to learn from.
There is also all of the responsibility that comes with the title: your words can have more impact so you definitely have to take care to make sure your meaning is clear or you don’t unintentionally misdirect someone with your feedback. I think a lot of people appreciate my mentorship and I hope to continue to fit this in to keep growing the next generation of technical leaders here.
I had the opportunity to attend re:Invent 2024 and speak to a lot of customers. I had never been, and it was my first (and so far only) business travel for Amazon! I had also never been to Las Vegas. The conference itself was interesting and a bit intense. I fit in a little tourism between sessions but Vegas is definitely not my vibe between the gambling and the smoking (and unfortunately getting COVID for the first time, even masking).
Between my tenure and my level, I found my judgement and decision making to be more in demand, whether it was auditing the operational properties of some new component or advising a mentee in a 1:1 on how to prepare themselves for a potential promotion. I really enjoy whipping up a one pager with some options and my recommendation for what we need to do next.
Hub Hub Hub
After over 8 years with GuardDuty I was offered the opportunity to move down a floor to our sibling service Security Hub to join the leadership team in reimagining the service. In addition to ramping up on all of the slightly different tech stacks and customer security value, I also had to get to know well over a hundred new people across all of these teams! With a huge effort across our entire organization we launched the updated hub at re:Invent 2025.
I didn’t move very far, and I still work closely with a lot of the GuardDuty folks I’ve known for years. I’ve really enjoyed the new challenges I’ve faced switching teams even as I’ve stayed in the same organization and security domain. One strange aspect is getting used to things I knew well on GuardDuty slowly no longer being relevant as my old teams make changes and updates where I no longer have much context. There were also the other big changes early this year, which affected a few people I work with.
Another obvious massive shift in the last year has been the rapid expansion in agentic software development at work. It’s an area where I’m a churning mix of skeptical, excited, worried, impressed, conflicted, and more. Probably a topic for another post but one thing it enables is for me to fit in some actual hands on development again, or as hands on as one can be with an agent doing a lot of the work for you. I think my past NLP work also helps me a lot in understanding where these AI systems can help and where they can hinder, especially when it comes to finding that sweet spot for maximizing the benefit from the models’ non determinism before handing off to deterministic code. As an experienced engineer I think I can do a lot to guide my teams in using these tools wisely and effectively.
Right now I’m working on a bunch of feature improvements across the Security Hub customer experience as well as leading the launch of Security Hub Extended. There is still so much to build, and the pace has definitely increased between the advent of agents and some pretty intense competition in the security market!
Next
I have no idea what the next 10 years will bring. I’m not sure I could even come up with a good prediction for six months from now! LLMs are without a doubt completely disrupting the software industry, at least in the short term, and significantly changing what it seems to mean to be a software engineer. I think a lot about what it means for our craft and our skills even as I must guide my teams and mentees in best practices.
For myself, in a decade I hope to be approaching an early retirement, or perhaps a pivot to some kind of teaching or consulting? I easily see myself ringing up another 10 years at AWS. The technical challenges at massive scale that we solve are encountered at very few places, and I get to work with many extremely talented people who are similarly motivated.
Even when it’s hard, I’ve got a job that’s exciting and fun, and that kind of work fulfillment is worth celebrating.
#amazon #anniversary #aws #reflection #work