Q&A with Darren Stegner, Senior Principal Engineer with SCOT

Darren Stegner is a native of the Pacific Northwest and graduated from Seattle Pacific University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. He began his career as a Support Engineer at Amazon in 2003 and is currently a Senior Principal Engineer in the Supply Chain Optimization Technologies (SCOT) organization. He is primarily focused on optimizing the outbound fulfillment network and leveraging its capabilities to enhance the delivery experience for customers.

Tell us about your journey at Amazon.

My journey at Amazon has been long, but surprisingly straightforward. As a recent computer science graduate in the wake of the .com bubble burst, I took a support engineer position at an online bookseller whose website I had not even visited. With the help of many, I was able to quickly transition into a software development role in the supply chain optimization space. From there I took every opportunity to stretch and leverage my abilities to deliver value for Amazon’s customers. I have had the unique opportunity to grow in my career as Amazon grew as a company, and 21 years later as a senior principal engineer I am still finding new and exciting ways as an individual contributor to optimize Amazon’s business and operations. Many would say that you have to move around to get ahead, but in my Amazon experience that has not been true.

How have you handled challenges and achieved success in the past?

The biggest challenges I face are in the area of influence. How do you influence without authority? My best advice is to understand what others are optimizing for, look for win-win scenarios, and bring data to support your position. It is important to ensure that all parties have equal visibility on key risks and trade-offs so that everyone is applying judgment against the same facts as it relates to taking a decision. If you are not an expert across the relevant domains, then use your autonomy to become the expert such that you are able to provide a comprehensive viewpoint.

What accomplishment at Amazon are you most proud of?

I am proud of the role I have played in helping Amazon optimize the fulfillment of orders through our rapidly expanding first-party fulfillment capabilities. Given the intersection of my knowledge and skills, I have been in a position to advise our senior leaders and set some of the mental models that shaped the direction of the well-publicized initiative to regionalize our fulfillment network and reduce our cost to serve. I am proud of what the team has accomplished to date and excited to see the resounding impact in the coming years.

"I try to learn and be inspired by people who are a step or two ahead of me in their career, not because I want to follow in their exact footsteps, but because they have been successful in leveraging their individual position to have broad impact."

What is something you have done that you would consider innovative or pioneering at Amazon so far?

In terms of innovation, I would point to two projects. The first was my lead role in the creation of the original service to perform real-time, customer-specific calculation of delivery dates and countdown timers for display on product detail pages. Prior to this work, customers only saw a static “Usually ships in 24 hours” message, and in the 20 years since this innovation, we have served customers hundreds of trillions of delivery dates. The second was my role in architecting Amazon’s delivery speed filtering capability in the product search page. As the first truly dynamic search feature, it has led the way for many additional technical and customer experience innovations in the last decade.

What brings you passion/excitement to your role and team?

As a Senior Principal Engineer working in supply chain optimization, I have a wide vantage point that provides the opportunity to look beyond our immediate business needs or organizationally constrained objectives. I am able to set things in motion that may take years to develop, while simultaneously guiding the team to deliver technical solutions to meet our near-term objectives. In my role as an individual contributor, I am part of no single team, yet I am part of every team in terms of my influence.

Who has been the most inspiring influence in your life?

I have found that inspiration and influence is best gathered from many rather than few. I take each relationship as an opportunity to observe areas in which others excel and learn how to apply them within the context of my work. I try to learn and be inspired by people who are a step or two ahead of me in their career, not because I want to follow in their exact footsteps, but because they have been successful in leveraging their individual position to have broad impact.

What is your favorite leadership principle and why?

Personally, I gravitate towards Deliver Results because at the highest level we are all working to deliver value for our customers. I don’t consider the other leadership principles any less important because the means by which you achieve a result is just as important as the result itself.

How do you stay up to date with the latest technologies and what strategies do you use to keep your skills sharp?

In the most basic sense, I view technology as a powerful tool that can be leveraged to unlock or optimize lines of business. As a technologist I would like to maintain expertise in all technologies, but unfortunately that is not possible. Alternatively, I try to maintain a knowledge of the capability envelope of available technologies so I can evaluate how a tool might be applied in a particular scenario. As these intersections come up, I take the opportunity to dive deep on a specific technology and develop a degree of expertise along the way. As odd as it sounds, I also think of myself as a business entity, and take the opportunity to learn new technologies if they will improve my personal efficiency. I am particularly excited to leverage recent advances in generative artificial intelligence to create a private assistant to address the human limitations of personal knowledge management and synthesis.

How do you foster a culture of innovation and creativity within your team and what techniques do you use to encourage experimentation and risk taking?

I encourage each person to leverage the particular intersection of their skills, experiences and interests to identify new opportunities or solutions. This unique vantage point allows each individual to make connections between business opportunities and technical capabilities that others may not see.

To check out opportunities within the SCOT organization click here .