Q&A with Chena Lee, SDE II for Amazon Freight Tech

Hello all, meet Chena! Chena joined Amazon in late 2018 and is currently a Software Development Engineer II on our Amazon Freight Tech team. Chena was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. She moved to Ireland alone at 16 and went to a high school in Cashel, Ireland. After graduating at 18, she moved one more time to Minnesota, U.S. to go to college and has stayed in the U.S. since. It's been almost 9 full years since Chena left her hometown, and now Minneapolis feels more like her hometown more than anywhere else!

Chena, can you tell us more about yourself and your Amazon journey?

I joined Amazon in October 2018. My first team owned a service very critical to Amazon.com business. Due to a reorg in November 2019, my team was moved to a different org which gave me my first exposure into Transportation. I learned a lot as my team onboarded.

Shortly after in early 2020, one of my mentors joined Amazon Freight Tech which was just starting to grow, and I saw an opportunity to learn and growth for myself after talking to her. She was the first and only SDM then. I followed her to Amazon Freight in March 2020. I've been mostly working on tech that enables accurate, efficient operations and have tremendously benefited from the amount and level of opportunities that a newly emerging org provides to even a junior engineer. Since then I have been promoted once to SDE II and now lead a team.

Throughout my time at Amazon, I met so many great mentors and friends who kindly and patiently helped me grow. Amazon hasn't been "just a workplace" for me. I'll forever be grateful to those people.

How did your past experience help prepare you for working at Amazon?

I didn't have a meaningful prior full-time industry experience, but I think some extracurricular activities helped me. I did some volunteering work (Girls Who Code) and was a Residential Advisor during my college years. Those experiences forced me to speak in front of a large audience and lead others, and they were terrifying back then. As someone who was brought up in a culture where speaking up is not the most desirable behavior and speaking English as second language, those experiences changed me and I was way better prepared for a career this industry than I would have been otherwise. Software Engineers, in contrary to the belief many students held, weren't simply required to sit and communicate solely with their computers.

What excites you MOST about your role and team at ATS?

I love that my role is to be a builder. I always loved problem solving of almost any kind, and I think many jobs require you to problem solve. But being able to ideate solutions to various problems AND to actually build the solutions that are scalable AND making sure the solution are reliable and resilient in various situations is pretty unique to this role. Being able to do it in a startup-like environment but with the job safety of a big tech company is a perk.

In your opinion, what is the most rewarding aspect of working in a diverse environment?

People commonly say that traveling opens your mind. However, I think living somewhere vastly different impacts your mind in a completely different level. Things that you thought were obvious aren't always obvious. How you believed 'everyone' is like turns out to be completely wrong. I think being immersed in a diverse environment can give you a lot of those without having to move physically to 20 different countries of vastly different cultures. I believe that the experience of further freeing one's mind and broadening the understanding of the world is cognitively stimulating to many people, myself definitely included.

Chena, can you finish the sentence for us? "When I'm not at work, you can find me..."

Nowhere consistently! I want to always try new things. In the past few years, I tried a martial art, skateboarding (cruising), inline skating, and received some personal training to get used to working out at gyms - which always felt like there's an invisible wall to me. I have also signed up for voice lessons this year (I'm a musician, and I want to write songs someday!). I want to keep exploring life.

What else are you involved in?

I’ve been active in mentoring and outreach for 5-6 years. I’m particularly interested in getting more women into computer science and mentoring those who might find me helpful. Starting in college, I was part of the team that ran Girls Who Code - MN chapter. We taught middle school and high school female students for free in order to get them exposed to computer science and coding.

I started finding other community engagement opportunities as soon as I started at Amazon in 2018. I was an Hour of Code Organizer. In the summer of 2019, Amazon Minneapolis hosted a 4-week internship program for high school girls. 4 were invited and I was a program lead. Then I started mentoring more women within Amazon. There are many such opportunities through programs provided by affinity groups like AWE (Amazon Women Engineers). Or sometimes you pay forward by mentoring your own mentor's new hire.

What's the last thing you read?

Crying in H Mart

What is your favorite place in the world?

Grand Canyon and under the sea in the Philippines.

What excites you most about the future?

I'm excited to keep exploring life because of my very long bucket list (that I actually keep. I'm a planner addict). I will never run out of things I want to try.

I’m also excited to try other locations to live in in the future. To start with I’m considering spending a month a year in various cities in the U.S. I’d like to try living in cities like Washington D.C., Boston, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco for a year or two. In the future, I would also like to do a year in Dubai, Cape Town (South Africa), and Dublin (go back to Ireland!)

Is there someone that inspires you in your career and why?

Many! I will name just a few. I met a professor in college. Her name is Maria Gini and she teaches and researches at the University of Minnesota. She got her PhD in Physics in Italy in 1972 and has been in her current position as a successful professor in Computer Science (AI/Robotics) for almost full 40 years. Imagine being in physics classes as a woman in 1972. That is 2 years before women could get their own credit cards and mortgages in the US. What's really inspiring is that after all those years, she's still very passionate about helping more women get into computer science. She'd even come and speak to a small classroom of middle and high school students whenever invited. I admire her achievements and the persistent passion in what she believes in. I hope to stay that way too about a cause and my career even when I get tired and my effort seems to not make a dent sometimes.

My grandma Yeonja Song is a source of inspiration and courage for me. She'd only had up to 4th grade education growing up just like many who were born around Korean war. In her 70s, she started going back to school and got both her middle school and high school diploma.

Jake Wagner, my previous manager in Amazon Freight, is one of my main inspiration for leadership styles. I read a famous book called Leadership and Self-Deception a couple years ago, and looking back he's a shining example of the leadership the book describes. I have learned and am continuing to learn from him, after I learned that being in tech doesn't mean you get to ignore the people part of the job.