I thought it might be a good idea to provide some advice for people who are considering applying for L7 Senior Software Engineering Manager roles at Amazon, even though I am just a sample of one. Amazon is a huge, gigantic, complex entity - so by no means is my experience, advice is representative of the company...rather I'm sharing my very own personal experience, aimed mostly at South African professionals who might be considering interviewing for senior management roles -- and are curious to learn from others who walked the path before. We are so lucky to have a global high-tech giant like Amazon operating in South Africa, offering engineering opportunities. I was even contemplating relocating back to the UK in 2020, but decided to stick it out in this beautiful country, try Amazon and live & work from Cape Town...No other global hi-tech company, apart from Amazon, offers software engineering roles in South Africa as far as I'm aware.
If you're considering leaving a C-level or Executive Head position behind, coming from a South African corporate, and are now eyeing out senior engineering manager roles in Amazon/AWS locally or internationally, then this post might just be of use to you.
DISCLAIMER: I'm sharing my own personal experiences and recommendations in the hope my story could help others make an informed decision. Yes, I'm currently employed at AWS as I write this, and so far enjoyed my journey of transition, pretty settled in now as an Amazonian, despite a bit of a rough start of complete change/disruption to both professional and life streams.
My experience going into AWS L7 Senior Manager Role
Before Amazon, from May 2017 to October 2020, I was the single threaded owner (STO aka CTO) for a video streaming platform serving 50+ countries in Africa. Reporting to me were a group comprising executive head of departments and senior managers responsible for:
1\ Software Delivery & Testing (Backend + Apps running on Smart TVs, Set Top Boxes, Browser Web Apps (Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari), iOS and Android mobile phones and tablets, Apple TVs, Android TVs. In this org, reporting to the senior manager were: 3x Software Dev Managers (Frontend + Backend - 10 dev teams), 1x Test/QA Manager.
2\ Platform, Networking & Video Infrastructure, DevOps: Data Centres in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Nigeria, London, Ghana. AWS & Azure cloud. CDN infrastructure. Networking backbone, internet transit infrastructure. Devops. Application Web hosting.
3\ Site Reliability Engineering and 24/7/36 Platform/Application Operations monitoring, 2nd and 3rd line technical support team.
4\ Platform Intelligence Health Dashboards, Alerting & Analytics, Content Discovery, Search and Recommendations. An AI/ML team responsible for building video and content discovery services.This team was also responsible for building Infra/Platform/App Health Analytics consoles.
5\ Enterprise & Solution Architecture. A group of architects cutting across software architecture, video streaming, encoding and media processing platform architects. Live streaming video headends, CDN architecture.
6\ Agile Program and Project Management Office. A group of cross-functional project management experts, including program managers, release managers, scrum masters and general program management.
7\ Cyber Security, Piracy and Governance - risk management, legal, compliance and regulatory ownership. Overall IT/Security and Compliance.
I owned all the above (I designed the org structure around cloud modernization), reporting directly to CEO and was part of a the Top Leadership team. I had direct P&L responsibilities in the order of billions of rands, having authority to manage commercial relationships with technology vendors, suppliers, etc. signing licensing agreements, SOPs, reviewing RFPs,etc. I serviced business, technology and customer operations (marketing, content, acquisition, HR tech, customer support). Under my leadership, the platform scaled to 10X scale, paved the way for a cloud-first future and created NextGen AI streams for personalized content discovery. I had delivered significant cost-savings, created a cloud-first transformation strategy and clear roadmap and built a strong leadership succession plan before leaving. I had a team of 200+ people, which extended to partner contractors & professional services. I decided to leave and was attracted to Amazon because of my exposure to AWS as an enterprise customer, I wanted to learn about what happens in the engine room of AWS.
Between 2013 and May 2017, before becoming a CTO, I was a freelance senior management consultant, taking on program director contracts where I worked with C-level stakeholders as my primary customer, running very large enterprise programs that cut-across multiple lines of business. Effectively having a virtual seat at the C-suite table, but without skin-in-the-game, helping executives deliver their top business, technology and product transformational goals. For these programs, I directed and executed large-scale program deliveries across the African continent, with project team sizes from 350-1000 people, most of my programs were tagged "billion rand programs" costing "a million rand a day". I enjoyed working 4-day weeks, took my time off according to my schedule, and worked just over 10 months a year, during that time period.
What made me leave executive roles behind and take a risk with a mid-senior management position? In this post, I shared a deep reflection that motivated for a change. I had set my target on a new domain, i.e. cloud services, an opportunity presented itself with AWS, I applied - and the rest is history. I had made a one-way door decision, there was no looking back - but I did have a bumpy start, which in retrospect, if I had access to these pointers beforehand, who knows...
