Day In The Life Of An AWS Cloud Application Architect

1. Title/ProServe team: Cloud Application Architect - US Shared Delivery Team - AppDev

2. Tell us about yourself.

My name is Martine. I am originally from Haiti and currently live in Houston, TX. I graduated from George Mason University with a MS in Software engineering in 2019. It was during this program that I started diving deeper into AWS. For a semester, I worked with one of my professors on a project that explored automatic trigger from a VM based deployment to serverless. Since then, I haven’t stopped. I spent countless hours learning and building on AWS using labs, tutorials and the AWS Educate platform. After graduation and some bumps in the road, I secured a role as an Associate Cloud Engineer. I was primarily deploying and monitoring multi-tenant applications in the cloud. In 2020, I joined AWS through a program called Tech U. I spent my first 5 months in Tech U then transitioned to an accelerated career program called A2C as a Cloud Developer. I was promoted this quarter to my current role.

Outside of work, I love spending time outdoors in parks, museums and zoos around Houston “re-learning” a lot of things and having fun with my daughter. I am always down for some good foods! My usual go-to cuisines are Caribbean, Indian, and everything Mediterranean!

3. Tell us about your role.

Cloud Application Architects work on a wide range of customers’ projects in various industries. Because of that, what the role looks like depends on what is your specialization and what projects you decide to work on. For me, the core of what interests me and what I have been doing so far is application development with a focus on refactoring. This had involved, on my past projects, changing existing code, re-architecting existing components, breaking monolith applications to micro-services… The size of the projects that I have worked on had varied from about 3 to more than 15 teammates (split across multiple workstreams) and across multiple industries and spaces (manufacturing, healthcare, machine learning, operations…). 

Outside of the projects I work on for my customers, I also do what we call internal activities (training, writing blogs, reviewing emails, mentoring…). I am in the process of joining an internal Technical Field Community (TFC) focused on Serverless. It is an opportunity for me to become specialized in this area, contribute to projects that help that community grow, and also bring back my experience from the fields to our service teams.

4. What is your typical day- Morning/noon/afternoon (Special activities, responsibilities, fun facts)?

I like to start my day early, get some work done, then take a break to help my daughter get ready for the day. In a typical day, I attend 1 or 2 meetings (can be standups, sprint planning, sprint retrospectives, demo, design review, or working sessions…). Then I will work on a project’s ticket. The ticket can be coding new functionalities, addressing bugs, researching and comparing possible solutions, architect a component of the project… Depending on the project, the meetings can happen in the morning or in the afternoon. Based on that, I will shift my schedule around a bit. If the meetings happen in the morning, I will jump in the calls, then work on a project’s ticket and finally reserve some time in the afternoon for internal activities. If the meetings happen in the afternoon, I will do my internal activities in the morning. I take a short lunch break midday and like to wrap up my day by the time my daughter gets back.

5. What do you like most about working for AWS? Did you have any inspiring moments?

I have to say the immense growth opportunity both at the skills level and career wise. The number of new things I get exposed to and I have to learn keep me grounding. I am constantly learning! I love that my day-to-day tasks help me keep my skills up-to-date. I have been here for almost two years and there hasn’t been a time when I felt bored, or there wasn’t nothing interesting I can do. And the best part about it is the fact that as you grow, you are also recognized and able to move your career forward.

I have certainly been inspired at different occasions and the common denominator has been people, being vulnerable in sharing openly their own challenges/stories in their personal and work life. Many of the affinity groups including Black Employee Network, Women@ProServe, Asians@ have led conversations that left me inspired.

6. What is your favorite leadership principles and why?

Many of the AWS leadership principal resonates with my personal values even before I started at AWS. So, it is hard for me to pick just one of them. I will go with Deliver Results

“Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.” The reason is because I find it encompasses many of the other leadership principles. Delivering results is the end goal but there is a lot that goes into it including being customer obsessed, diving deep, thinking big, taking actions at the right time.