Q&A with the Amazon Stitch Core Team: Asif Maniar, Tom Wu, & Charles Lynn

The Stitch team runs marketing campaigns that help customers find the most value on Amazon. We believe many customers have only scratched the surface of what Amazon can provide them– our charter is to better understand customer needs and invent ways to meet those needs through marketing innovation. Using big-data and machine Learning, we are able to show benefits and services that customers might be interested in, thus increasing their engagement with Amazon.

Q&A with Asif Maniar, Software Development Manager

?How does the team fit into the larger LEO organization, the larger Amazon ecosystem? The Stitch team allows marketing managers to run cross-channel marketing campaigns and gather insights on campaign performance. This allows Amazon to show relevant content to customers, and optimize a customer’s experience. We provide Amazon marketing managers with the ability to conduct rapid experimentation and drive impact across the entire Consumer organization.

Who are your customers, why is it important to deliver for them? All Amazon customers! Our platform’s primary objective is to reach customers with the right message at the right time across multiple channels. This means all Amazon customers?can receive personalized marketing content whether it’s through online or offline channels. Our customers also include Amazon Marketing Managers and Business Analysts who use our internal tools to create campaigns, content and reports. We are currently going through the exciting process of globalizing our platform to make it available to customers across the world!

What emerging technologies is your team using / learning: Our platform is built on Cloud Native technologies and distributed software patterns, including scalable micro-services, ML and Big Data pipelines. Some tools we use include custom API’s, Lambdas, Kinesis Firehose, EMR, DynamoDB, RDS and Redshift.?We are currently learning and building our data pipeline orchestration on Airflow. We also have an internal UX for our product and marketing managers, where they can setup and evaluate marketing strategies, which is built primarily on React. Given that our request size is rapidly increasing, we constantly evaluate emerging technology and stay on the cutting edge!

What LPs are most important to your team, how are they used day-to-day? Customer Obsession, Ownership, Invent & Simplify are very important to the Stitch team. We are obsessed about improving the customer’s experience onsite. We build feedback loops and algorithms that will stop showing a campaign if a customer is not interested in the offering anymore. Engineers are encouraged to work with stakeholders on complete end to end feature delivery, and empowered to innovate, make decisions and solve complex problems.

How does your team solve tough challenges? We like to start by building the vision for our “North Star”. We work with stakeholders to build the vision from the customer’s point of view, and build consensus between product and engineering teams. We can then work backwards from the vision, ensure we establish smaller milestones towards the vision, and keep moving towards our goals. We celebrate small milestones, and visit our progress towards the “North Star” frequently, to ensure we stay on track. We are agile; we use data to measure customer impact and make ongoing adjustments to our plans.

How do you ensure every voice on your team is heard? We have a highly collaborative and transparent team culture. All team members are directly involved in both short-term (milestones, sprints, tasks etc.) and long-team planning (yearly & quarterly roadmaps). We have regular brainstorming/planning sessions, white boarding, Slack channels, video calls, 1-1’s and team events to further encourage open discussions and participation. Members are also encouraged to document ideas if they prefer and collaborate asynchronously. This open culture also breeds ownership and innovation as the team is aware of what and why we are building something and how it will improve the experience of Amazon customers!

?Q&A with Tom Wu, Software Engineer

What brought you to this team at Amazon? The idea of leveraging machine learning to bring better-recommended content to Amazon’s customer. I like finding more challenging projects to polish my technical skills and the Stitch team gives me the chance to do that.

What keeps you on this team at Amazon? My team is always insisting on the highest standards to find the best solution solving the challenges. During the deep-diving procedure, I am able to learn a lot from the senior engineers in my team.

Favorite team memory, interaction, event: It is hard to keep in touch during the Covid-19, but the team has the game session during lunchtime every Thursday. It is a good chance to learn from my co-workers better. I am waiting for returning to the office, so we could enjoy the in-person team events.

Q&A with Charles Lynn, Data Engineer

What brought you to this team at Amazon? The idea of hyper personalization to predict content customers would enjoy was an exciting problem to solve. I wanted to use data to help customers discover new facets of Amazon they may never enjoy otherwise. I was also impressed with how the team encourages creativity and is equipped with the tools and resources needed for success.

What keeps you on this team at Amazon? I’ve been in the data engineering space for a while and can say one thing that keeps me on this team with Amazon is the camaraderie we share. We have new and complex problems to solve, and we all have our unique skills to bring to the table. This is a group of incredibly talented people I can learn from. The Stitch project itself also offered the high visibility I wanted, and gave me the opportunity to impact almost every Amazon customer.

Favorite team memory, interaction, event: Moving across the country is never easy and especially in the middle of a pandemic. Our team has made me feel like a part of the family almost immediately even despite the physical distance between us. We always keep engaged with games and events, but the one that stands out the most to me would be the time we completely dominated in the virtual escape room…. Who doesn’t love winning?

To become an Engineer on the Stitch Core Tech team, apply here.

For more information about job openings in Amazon Prime, please reach out to Cheyanne Ausman - [email protected]

Disclaimer : The opinions expressed in this article are reflective of employee personal experiences