Q&A with Alexandre, SDEII at Amazon Stores InTech Team in Madrid, Spain

As a Tech Recruiter for EMEA Amazon, I recently had the pleasure of connecting with Alexandre Zajac , a Software Development Engineer II at Amazon and founder of the Hungry Minds newsletter , over a coffee chat at our Madrid office. In this article, I share insights from our engaging conversation about Alex's inspiring journey from university to his current role in Amazon's Search and Retail teams. Through Alex's experiences, readers will gain a unique glimpse into the life of a software engineer at Amazon, exploring everything from daily responsibilities to key achievements.

Hello Alex, can you tell us more about yourself and your career journey?

Hey there! ?? I’m Alex, the man behind the Hungry Minds newsletter, and I come from Paris, France. I have a pretty peculiar starting story with Amazon. In between my 2 last years of university, I had the chance to do an exchange to study in California. I applied to more than a hundred internships in the fall of 2019, and finally decided to join Amazon from Spain as an intern in the summer of 2020!

In this internship I developed a large-scale image processing data pipeline for fashion-related items by creating and managing AWS resources such as EC2, Lambda, SQS, CloudWatch, DynamoDB and S3 with the AWS CDK and TypeScript. I was happy to get a return offer for an internship the following year.

For the second internship, I delivered an automated filtering and auditing system for Amazon's wearable products, entirely managed with a single infrastructure based on AWS CDK (Lambda, Cloudwatch, S3) with Typescript, as well as internal processing platforms.

I joined the EU INTech organization as an SDE-1 in November 2021, on the very same day as my birthday! I worked on features related to Search and Retail, which is really huge! Think of the recent things you bought on Amazon, how the products display, scroll, zoom: I had the chance to work on part of all of these. There’s always this recurrent system design question on “What happens when you press enter and search in Amazon?”, well I can assure you working in Search has been pretty dense and rewarding.

I grew to the SDE II role after 5 quarters and our team shifted to work more on personalization within Amazon Retail Search. This is the best of both worlds to me, staying close to a domain I’ve acquired experience in (Search) and working on filters and personalization within it.

Why did you choose to pursue a tech career and join Amazon?

Honestly when I was younger, I had no clue I’d be working in tech. I wasn’t one of the nerdy kids learning to program their fridge at age 7. I wanted to be a dentist, then a pilot and then a trader.

Technology kind of grew to me when I was at university. I discovered code, and how it can solve problems, fast. I discovered that when you use maths and code, you can solve pretty interesting problems. I already loved maths, so finishing my studies with a Master in AI and Data Science at l’Ecole Polytechnique felt like a dream come true.

It’s always hard to know where to start, and I do think where you start matters a lot for your career. I decided to pursue working for Amazon because of 3 factors:

-???????? The knowledge, people and culture that you can meet (this is underrated)

-???????? The scale and amount of impact you have on customers

-???????? The financial and career stability that it provides

Can you tell us more abour your current role?

I’m a software development engineer (SDEII), so I am responsible for designing, implementing, testing, deploying and maintaining features from our product. This is one particularity that I really like, we don’t have separate teams for all these tasks, we need to wear multiple hats and do the work.

My team’s mission is centered on bringing personalization to Amazon’s customers. In an age where AI is put everywhere, we focus on strategically developing features for customers to get personalized experiences in Search. What I love about our team and product is that this kind of work implies working and collaborating with hundreds of other folks around the globe, and you learn a lot from this!

Can you describe a typical day as an SDE?

No days look like each other, except for the daily meeting we have in our team. We always start the day with it to know where are our blockers and how we are progressing on our sprint goals. We’re using a simplified version of Scrum, so we organize our work around 2 weeks of sprint.

In the day to day I spend time:

-???????? Reviewing designs and proposals for the upcoming features we have

-???????? Implementing features and testing them in development environments and reviewing PRs from my peers

-???????? Syncing with stakeholders and senior engineers on design decisions

-???????? Writing/updating documentation

-???????? Reviewing code from my peers

The thing I enjoy the most is solving problems. With code, without code, but delivering value for the customers and the business. There are so many roles in tech, and so many ways to bring value and simplify/automate stuff: I couldn’t imagine doing something else!

What is your proudest moment at Amazon?

This has to be the launch of the ‘Fits You’ feature. It’s a project that took us years to complete, and that solves a very deep problem of the search page: Getting items that will actually fit me.

So many learnings here, working with 3 different time-zones both on science and product, data and software engineering work, delivering a new filter when we were used to work more on the Search results, how to solve the problem at scale and with minimal downtime and maximum coverage. I’m just so proud of the work our team has done and all the people that contributed to this!

This really shows the importance we put on leadership principles, and here the main one is customer obsession.

What do you find most unique and rewarding about Amazon's culture and work environment?

Amazon is my first working experience, but I see 2 things here:

1.???? Leadership principles. I know this is said in every interview, but it’s just used in so many ways and provides such a strong and unified culture to the company. I also find the principles very good applied strictly to coding and life outside of work, it’s a real asset.

2.???? Being data driven. I think that never leaves you. I noticed the change in mindset outside of work with principles I learned and acquired in the job.

Adding to that the people and amount of technology you see day to day, I find it to be a pretty amazing place to work in.

How has working at Amazon enabled you to grow as a professional?

Since when I started working on Amazon, I started growing in various verticals:

-?????? Software engineering: I started fresh out of the university and I learned a lot about developing on Java, AWS, Typescript and a lot more internal framework

-?????? Soft skills: Being product driven, communicating your ideas and seeking alignment in design reviews is something you have to learn on the job.

-?????? Myself: When you start working in another country, you also learn a lot of things that you can’t get from school. How to manage your week, your goals, life outside of work: this all comes from having a productive and stable job.

Which of Amazon's Leadership Principles resonates the most with you?

I can’t choose one, but deliver results, learn and be curious and bias for actions are really strong:

-?????? Deliver results: Developing the features and shipping them to customers. Aligning product, business and tech to make it happen.

-?????? Learn and curious: I think developers need to be learners for life, things change so fast! Of course, fundamentals are important, but always keeping a learning mindset is crucial for me.

-?????? Bias for action: At a local level, if something takes 2 mins and needs to be done, do it. At a more global level, be solutions oriented, ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

What is your favorite Amazon product or service?

I really love Amazon Go, the “Just Walk Out” technology is pretty fascinating.

I also enjoy a lot using Prime, it’s feels like magic to me to be able to deliver items all around the world in 1 day, crazy.

AWS comes in the list as well, I’ve been using it since the internship to my day-to-day work, and working with infrastructure as code and any cloud service you need is pretty powerful.

How do you maintain a healthy work-life balance?

This is a great question. A healthy work life balance doesn’t mean you need 50% of work and 50% of life, at all!

It means you need to find what works the best for your productivity and health. For me it’s:

-?????? At least 7 hours of sleep

-?????? No more than 2 coffees a day

-?????? Default to water for drinking in the day

-?????? At least 3 gym sessions with cardio per week

-?????? Put a hard split between work time and chill time

Outside of work, I love using code to draw art. I know this sounds weird but it’s very relaxing, and it’s called generative art. I played volleyball for 10 years of my life, so that never leaves you. Like anyone I also love to travel, hang out with friends and really enjoy a good meal!

What's the best tip you would give someone who wants to apply and interview for Amazon?

2 set of tips:

-?????? Don’t give up; the market is challenging, but you can’t lose if you don’t give up. Spend a good time preparing, follow the process and improve until you get what you want!

-?????? Focus on your strengths, not only code; people want to work with people. Of course, technical and problem-solving skills are important, but never forget the rest.

Did you enjoy the article? Every Monday, 40,001+ engineers receive Alexandre Zajac 's curated list of deep dives, trends and tools to start the week on the right foot. Join them here for free: newsletter.hungryminds.dev

If you want to join him at Amazon Spain, have a look to open roles here and start preparing for your next SDE interview with resources shared at this link