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...
Some pointers
Think deeply about your next move. Changing from an Executive to Mid-Senior Manager role can be very uncomfortable, are you sure?
Make sure you do your research about the expectations from the role. Ask the hiring manager or recruiter to share the job role guidelines with you if possible. Check out the forums, speak to other people in your network. Dave from ScarletInk is an ex-Amazonian who shares some very useful information. An L7 manager role is probably the hardest and most intense role in Amazon, in between middle-management and executive leadership, an L7 wears multiple hats at different times in the day. Highly operational, one needs to come to terms with being an operator, getting their hands dirty in the details, even if it means leading a development team yourself (yes, running sprints, stand-ups, doing task-level user story planning, managing interns, coaching engineers), to owning a top-level strategy and roadmap. If you're used to delivering through others, like you might have had heads of department reporting to you (as I did), or senior managers (as I did), you can kiss that goodbye. You're now. the head, senior manager, and also middle manager if you need to manage a development team. If you ran your own PMO (as I did), or you hired program and project manager consultants (as I did), you now lose all that, either you do it yourself, or you work with partners serving those roles. What I'm trying to say is, an L7 role is hands-on, demanding you to produce artefacts and work outputs that you may have previously relied on others to do for you. This transition can be very uncomfortable, and some people might see this transition as a step too far backwards. Having said that, all the responsibility of managing an org, even as an executive, applies to a single 2-Pizza team. You do run your own business. You own your operating plan. You own your operations: technical ops, stability, monitoring, true devops style. Heck, you will also be on-call! Yes, you will get paged when there's issues in production. You create a roadmap. You motivate for investment through Amazon's peculiar mechanisms. You report on your business metrics, with weekly, monthly and quarterly business reviews. The transition though is you move from the macrocosm world - to a microcosm world. And what you then appreciate is the sheer scale of AWS - Amazon didn't get its name for nothing. Like the Amazon river, it is enormous, huge, unfathomable - so being a small cog in this gigantic machine can be an eye-opening, refreshing and a humbling experience for some people. Most people have been programmed to climb the proverbial career ladder, so if you're still carrying that mindset, and are seeking the next step, and feel like you're past the stage of being a scrum master, doing performance reviews for engineers, guiding intern projects, drawing up project plans in detail, sometimes by hand - and being part of a middle-manager segment with thousands of other middle managers - moving from being a big fish in small pond, to a small fish in an ocean, you're going to be quite uncomfortable... you will probably be tempted to look for the exit within 6 months of onboarding... which I actually considered myself. Oh also, if you're used to owning a big budget, billion rands budgets (as I was), and you're the CTO who applies detailed financial models to calculate total cost of ownership in decided what to buy, what to build in-house, what 3rd party tools to use, making decisions on tooling to purchase, etc. well, you're hardly to leverage those skills, which could make you even more uncomfortable. If you're past the stage of getting kick out of technical design reviews, looking at engineering logs and graphs, getting excited about debugging software issues (like I am, I left engineering a long time ago, been there, done that, became a Principal Engineer, bought the t-shirt, prefer business technology management instead), then you're going to be quite uncomfortable. You should enquire about circle of influence, find out about the stakeholder maps...leaving a hierarchical corporate, from a C-suite top team where you were part of the executive council, to being part of a very large group, think 10X scale at least, say your typical top-team moves from 8 to 80...how comfortable are you going to be adapting your style of leadership? Instead of you having the ear of the key C-suite, when you could just have a coffee or do nemawashi one-on-ones, all of those methods don't apply here. You will experience some of these topics during the interview process as part of the situation-based questions.
Find out about the scope-of-role, domain, technology, as much as possible, before the interview or post the interview.
If you're used to owning large-scope, ask for information about the current business size, strategy and charter. Find out about your responsibility, the product and areas of the technology stack. Enquire about the team sizes, how many 2-Pizza teams, age of teams, tenure of engineers, tenure of managers - level of managers reporting to you. Ask about the current painpoints. Ask about the strategy. Ask about the ops load. Ask about what type of customers. Find out as much as possible before making assumptions or go in with wishful thinking. Seek to understand as much as possible the scope-of-role, future plans for scaling. Enquire about the scope of role, size of teams under management, age of team, key objectives and deliverables, key business and engineering metrics. Find out as much about the business unit before hand (strategy, impact, markets, active users, etc.) Find out about how deeply technical you're expected to be. When I interviewed, I did ask for this data but the responses were slow in coming. This was around Covid time, as I was already unemployed by then so I didn't stress too much about it because AWS by reputation, brand was by far the strongest driver for me - all I needed was a foot in the door, prepared to work my way up again, if I needed to. I knew I was in for a big disruption and so I was prepared to empty my cup at the risk of starting over again, and work with people less experienced than me as my peers.
Verify if the job specification advertised is specific or a generic one or "pooling req"
The big high-tech companies of the world like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. employ hundreds of thousands of people. Amazon has 1.5 million employees. Jaw-dropping, mind boggling for us South Africans coming from even Pan-African wide corporates, this is scale like you've never seen before. This means the hiring recruitment engine is a production factory in its own right. When there's a peak in hiring demand, as was the case during the pandemic, companies would advertise generic roles, even at senior manager role. Especially if the organization is scaling, growing and their strategy isn't fully formed yet. Take time to get as much clarification as possible - find out if the job advertized for, is actually the role you would end up doing. If the job spec mentions certain technology and service domains, make sure you get clarity on that. Ask about how assignments might change post a successful interview outcome. In my case, I was all geared up and primed for a certain product category (it was something I was quite excited about) but between signing the contract and onboarding, the org design changed and I was assigned a different manager and a different team, product and technology area. In my case, by that time, I had already made the one-way door decision, packed my house up, got the kids out of school, found a new house to buy and was well on my way to relocating. I wasn't going to pause an relook at the situation, I as unemployed, the train had left the station...it doesn't have to be this way for you...If you find out you are part of a generic interview loop looking for candidates, and you're successful, you should reserve signing the contract until you've had a chance to learn about your assignment. As an experienced Tech Executive, you should show up as being in control and command the situation in your favour - because you're coming in to offer your services, and Amazon makes no secret about its hiring bar - that is new people hired from external are expected to raise the bar more than 50% of existing team members. So take time to seek to understand the job, role, technology and product domain you're getting into.
Agree with hiring manager or recruiter to notify you of any changes to contract either business unit change, hiring manager change, product change, etc.
In this age of technology disruption, organizations are in constant change. It is a reality that sometimes the gap between the interview, signing the contract and onboarding can take months. Sometimes executive leaders have a 3-6 month notice period. During this period, the hiring situation could change. This thing happened to me. I was set on a role, technology and product domain, but down the line things changed, and I was reassigned. I wish I could have had the foresight to agree upfront, as part of my contract negotiation, agreeing with the hiring manager and recruiter - that should there be reassignments between contract signing and onboarding, we should renegotiate the terms of agreement. Looking back, based on my own personal situation and decision to disrupt myself, I wouldn't have made a different decision. But my advice is for you to be aware that these things could happen, you don't want to end up joining and then realising that this is not your cup-of-tea. As an executive, C-level professional, you should come to the negotiating table and demonstrate backbone (an Amazon LP).
Negotiate salary as best as you can and be prepared for a drop in salary
Amazon has a peculiar way of compensating employees, with a mix of base pay and restricted stock units. Just google or ask ChatGPT to break it down for you. Compensation is a personal and private topic - it's not always about the money (as in my case). Typical South African C-Level executives enjoy a very decent base pay, depending on sector, can get anything between 60%-150% performance-based bonus of base pay annually, and also enjoy bonus incentives like retention bonus, and on top-of-that restricted stocks that vest annually. Add all those up as your total compensation and it comes to a good number. In my case, my previous compensation exceeded the offer for L7 role. I took a 25% cut in base pay, looked at the stocks with wide eyes (one share was over R35k at the time), did the math and projected over four years to break even or come close to recovering, should the share price enjoy a healthy trajectory. In 2023, I earned less that what I earned in 2020...and now in 2024 it seems like I'm trending positive - but not at the rate one expects to switch jobs - usually, one leaves for at least 20-30% increment in salary. I'd like to think that what I lost in earnings, I more than gained in professional experience, which is priceless. My advice to you is try to negotiate to get to the point you're comfortable with and then make your decision with open eyes. Read all about the 2-year cliff and 4-year cliff and come to terms with what's expected from you in terms of performance, raising the bar and getting promoted to the next level. Oh, on that note - when you join as L7, even though you know from your own industry experience, and after sizing up your team, peers and leaders you report to, that you may have just joined at the wrong level, i.e. you should be L8...well, you're constrained to L7 until you're promoted. You can't apply for next level roles unfortunately. So you strike a conversation with the hiring manager being curious about the scope for promo, path to promo and general expectations. There isn't a set time period, but do your research and know what you're getting yourself into, as again - doing the hard time, waiting it out, might be very uncomfortable and frustrating to some people who feel they've taken a step too far backwards, regretting their move.
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