Amazon

sairam's work experience at Amazon.com (2008-2011)

Supply Chain Systems (May 2008 - Aug 2011)

TL;DR: Working as an Application Engineer at Amazon, I have learnt a lot about the ecosystem along with how processes make it one of the best companies on Earth

Details

Our team was part of the fulfillment pipeline which was responsible for maintaining a steady flow of shipments to the downstream systems. Our systems pass information of shipments to drop-shippers, merchants and 45 Amazon warehouses in 4 realms which fulfill hundreds of thousands of shipments everyday.

My Contributions

Code Improvements:

  • Make enhancements to various parts of the code in order to improve the performance of the system and improve customer experience
  • Setup log pulling in order store the logs for a month into S3 instead of 3 days on local machines Participated in HQ migrations for FCs and wrote documentation for the process
  • Adding config for setting up new FCs and participate in testing of the order flow
  • Worked on different parts of the Shipment Consolidation project which is to consolidated items from multiple orders into a single shipment without missing promise for the orders
  • Worked on re-architecting of the system into a scalable, distributed, fault tolerant workflow system on an internal workflow software

Operational Excellence:

  • Drove HQ migrations for FCs and wrote documentation for the process
  • Worked on the procedure for merging data from individual stacks into one without impacting dependent systems in an SOA world. Total of data from 30 databases was fit into 7 databases which helps the company save on infrastructure and remove overhead of maintaining databases and hosts
  • Part of the team’s oncall rotation (12 hours a day). The oncall is responsible for resolving issues that arise within our team which would cause loss of revenue or impact hundreds of customers
  • Identification of root causes for various problems including stuck shipments which missed promise and unusual behavior of shipment generations
  • Worked on tickets to fix issues reported by customers about their orders
  • Resolved total of 900 tickets as part of operational support within Amazon
  • Worked on scaling up across various instances for Q4 2010
  • Worked on reducing TCO by more than half for my team in 4 months
  • Setup log pulling in order store the logs for a month into S3 instead of 3 days on local machines
  • Adding config for setting up new FCs and participate in testing of the order flow

Testing:

  • Performing end to end tests for various branches of code as part of the monthly release of changes into production

Improving developer productivity:

  • Created a single page app which will helps the team maintain a central location of shortcuts while working on oncall
  • Created and trained the team in using bookmark shortcuts to use the single page app to redirect across internal portals

Hiring:

  • Participated in hiring for Supply Chain team

Technologies Used

  • Java
  • C++
  • Ruby
  • Perl
  • Shell Scripting
  • HTML / css / js