Departing AWS: Conscience, Growth, and Work-Life Balance

I decided to feed my last blog post on leaving AWS into NotebookLM:

The provided text is an extended, introspective essay written by a senior engineering leader detailing the reasons for his resignation from Amazon Web Services (AWS) after four and a half years at the Cape Town headquarters. The author structures his departure around three core concerns: Spirituality and Conscience, particularly regarding the company's involvement in projects like Project Nimbus amid the Middle East conflict; Lack of Professional Growth, driven by structural changes within AWS and limited opportunities for promotion to director level (L8) in South Africa; and Negative Return on Investment (ROI) in Time, exemplified by increasing work hours, extensive weekend work, and compromised work-life balance, despite the financial success of his stock options. The essay concludes that the job no longer provided satisfactory personal, professional, or spiritual alignment, leading him to pursue a new role in Intelligent Traffic Systems with a local South African company.

Here's the audio generated (it got my RAGE model wrong, it stands for Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations):

Here's the video generated (not bad, but it got 2023 mixed up with 2024) - but a good summary nonetheless:

Why I left AWS after 4.5 years as an L7 Senior Engineering Manager

Earlier this year, on 05/30 (this is how Amazon writes dates, 30th May) I walked out of the amazing Amazon Africa headquarters in Cape Town, after spending four years and six months, as a senior engineering leader. I'm writing this post three months after a sabbatical break, and after a week into my new job (started 09/01) in a totally different field of Intelligent Traffic Systems... 

Here's a screenshot from my LinkedIn profile on my time with AWS:

Here's a video of me from 2022:

And here's some memories from my time there. Listen, I did enjoy my time with Kumo/AWS. I met some fantastic, highly intelligent, self-driven, motivated and resilient people from diverse backgrounds, from all over the world. AWS is indeed a special place. Their motto: Work Hard. Have Fun. Make History -- is very real! For anyone considering working in AWS, go for it! But be sure to do your homework first. This is just my story, a single datapoint from 1.5 million Amazonians, and 290000+ AWS employees worldwide - and in a small pond from South Africa (SA), a sample of 1 L7 engineering leader from a pool of ±7-9 managers, servicing 250-300 software engineers across Kumo and EC2 (this alone hints at the opportunity for L8 promo in SA is very small...)

Memorable moments with my teams...

I left AWS in good standing if I decided to boomerang back, here's a goodbye email sent by my manager to 1000+ people:

Why did you leave AWS, you seem to have been on a good trajectory, yes? 

My AWS colleagues, family, friends and now too, my new coworkers asked me why I left AWS. Feelings about exiting AWS started back in Q3 2024 triggered by the events unfolding in the middle east, causing me to reflect deeply on my personal and professional aspirations critically assessing my value system, borne from my RAGE model which has been my north star for over a decade.  

It turned out that the key metric is Return on Investment (ROI) across these three dimensions: 1/ Spirituality; 2/ Professional Growth and 3/ Work-Life balance. 

Advice for Technology Executives eyeing out AWS L7 Snr Manager role

As I write this post, my phonetool (a cool internal service where employees can lookup people) says I've been working at Amazon for 3 years, 3 months and 13 days (it actually feels much longer than that!!). 

 

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...

Sharing my writing example exercise from Amazon's interview process

Here is what I submitted to Amazon, as part of their interview process for an L7 Senior Engineering Manager role, in 2020. Depending on the role you're interviewing for, you will get a writing exercise - the one I chose was on Innovation - here's the ask:

Innovation

What is the most inventive or innovative thing you've done? It doesn't have to be something that's patented. It could be a process change, product idea, a new metric or customer facing interface – something that was your idea. It cannot be anything your current or previous employer would deem confidential information. Please provide us with context to understand the invention/innovation. What problem were you seeking to solve? Why was it important? What was the result? Why or how did it make a difference and change things?

Writing Guidelines

1. Write in the style you would use to write a business whitepaper or essay and do not use bullet points, graphics, tables, charts or flow charts.
2. Do not include any confidential or proprietary information from current/past employers.
3. Remember as you write that the reader may not be familiar with specific technical terminology, corporate cultures, and scenarios.  Use language and descriptions in your response that enable readers to fully understand the situation.
4. Please limit your response to 1-2 pages (no more than 8000 characters).

So since I was experimenting going back to being close to technical engineering, I decided to go deep into my past as an engineer, when I invented the Talking EPG:

More than ten years later, a talking interface finally made it to general availability:

Here's the document: Two pages in length, keeping to the written guidelines.