Amazon India

Role

1. Aug 2018Left after about 30 months and 68 interviews for the fraud and risk org to join Philips.
2. ~2017Moved to the India payments fraud and risk team (away-team model) and led the one-account-per-customer fraud check for the Amazon Pay launch, from requirements and stakeholder communication through onboarding.
3. Feb 2016Joined Amazon Development Center India as Software Development Engineer II, an individual-contributor role on the catalog ingestion and normalization team, and built the onboarding repository the team used for new engineers.

Scope and responsibilities

• Individual-contributor role as Software Development Engineer II, first on catalog ingestion and normalization, then on India payments fraud and risk as part of an away team.
• Owned fraud use cases for the Amazon Pay India launch end to end, from requirements and design through stakeholder communication, code reviews and onboarding.
• Set technical targets past the ask and tracked the results, such as sizing a fraud check for 1,150 TPS against a 20 TPS requirement and raising sprint task completion to 85% with a new process.
• Designed shared contracts and self-service procedures that other teams adopted with little developer help, including a risk contract used by 6 client teams and a feed migration procedure used for 29 providers.
• Took part in hiring for the fraud and risk org with 68 interviews and set up the standard question bank used in 14 weekend hiring events.
• Built capability in others as a volunteer trainer in agile software development and product ownership (about 90 people across 3 agile software development workshops), a mentor to interns and junior engineers, and a reviewer on 3 promotion documents.
• Took on cost and reliability work for fraud services around Prime Day, from JVM tuning and load-tested host sizing to tracing a faulty fraud rule.

Signature work

1. 01

   Led fraud controls for the Amazon Pay India launch

   Led the one-account-per-customer check end to end, built for 1,150 TPS against a 20 TPS requirement; then unblocked general availability and put about 5,300 stalled investigations back with investigators.

   See the evidence

2. 02

   Mechanisms other teams adopted

   A generic risk contract that 6 client teams used unchanged, a self-service feed migration used for 29 providers, and an interview question bank used in 14 hiring events.

   See the evidence

3. 03

   Cost and reliability around Prime Day

   Garbage-collection CPU from about 17.7% to 2.4%, about $36K a year saved in hosts, and a faulty fraud rule traced and escalated as a sev-2 on Prime Day.

   See the evidence

Year by year

1. 2018

   Took on cost and reliability for the fraud services around Prime Day: cut garbage collection on one service to about 2.4% of CPU, saved about $36K a year in hosts through load tests and a hardware clean-up, and traced a faulty fraud rule on Prime Day and escalated it as a sev-2. Became the trainer program's highest-scoring trainer, then left in August to join Philips.

   12 events

2. 2017

   Moved to payments fraud and risk and led the one-account-per-customer fraud check for the Amazon Pay India launch end to end, then unblocked general availability and got about 5,300 stalled investigations back to investigators. Designed a risk contract that 6 client teams adopted and set up the org's interview question bank. Won the Zeus Team Award for the risk-evaluation API and a Spot Award for a sprint process change.

   16 events

3. 2016

   Joined Amazon in February as an individual contributor on the catalog ingestion team, made feed migration a self-service procedure that 29 providers moved onto without developer help, and owned the team's move of 57 hosts to Amazon Linux. Also backfilled about 2 billion catalog records, won the catalog org's global hackathon and started teaching agile software development to other engineers as a volunteer trainer.

   9 events

What I took from it