Working at Amazon Halo: An SDE’s Perspective
As the Senior Principal Technologist on the Halo team, I lead the overall Halo architecture and have the opportunity and pleasure to have purview into how our development team uses customer insights and feedback to create valuable solutions that add immediate value to their Halo experience. My vantage point also offers me a window into gaps in the Halo user experience which pose creative challenges that teams can work on to better serve our customers’ needs. At Amazon we have saying that it’s always Day One, which means we are always learning, and that core belief empowers us to constantly try new approaches, all in the effort to make Halo a trusted part of our customers’ wellness journey. And what I especially love is that those approaches can come from anyone, even from software development engineers who are literally celebrating their first day inside the organization.
With nearly eight years under my belt at Amazon, one unique thing about Amazon is the amount of freedom we get to determine the direction of the technology and product. Developers have a say in all aspects of technology and product, and I am able to get more done with practical processes and the high trust and responsibility that Amazon has for its developers. While this may not be the norm at other organizations, we place a great emphasis on developer feedback, so that we can find solutions that get us to market faster. This open conversation on the product presents opportunities that are hard to find in other places.
While this may all seem like a great approach to product development and optimization, you may be asking how you as a new developer will have a direct hand in influencing (or leading) a project. That’s a great question. Ownership is key to how we work at Amazon. As a new developer onboard, you will get mentorship from peers and more senior technical members of the team and across the org. This will help you understand the technology and processes of the team. Developers usually start contributing in the first couple of weeks — in terms of designs, bug fixes and eventually owning and implementing large parts of the system. We are always raising the bar and thinking bigger. This means there is always an opportunity to build that new feature, make an existing feature more usable, make things faster and more efficient. Developers come up with these ideas, socialize them and own the implementation and outcomes of these ideas regularly.
So, what does that process look like? We follow an agile process that always begins with a clear customer focus and a challenge to make their experience more rewarding. Most teams are 2-pizza teams with 5–8 members (“2-pizza teams” is a fun, internal colloquialism that ensures our process doesn’t become overcomplicated and maintains its nimbleness), and these teams have ownership over parts of our architecture. Developers in the team work together to achieve team goals, help each other with brainstorming, review each other’s work, and share responsibilities in maintaining a high bar on customer experience. Developers also work cross-team to build the right interfaces for cross component interactions, participate in design reviews of components from across the org, and participate as bar raisers of different aspects of the product to elevate the customer experience.
One good example for this by the team is to make the sleep feature on Halo work for Alexa queries. Our Amazon Halo band is a battery operated device connected over Bluetooth to a phone that’s connected to the cloud. When a user wakes up in the morning and says, “Alexa, how was my sleep?” we wanted to be able to respond to the user with the latest results as soon as the user woke up. This involved changes all through the stack in modules owned by different 2-pizza teams including Firmware, Android/iOS apps, and cloud services. Developers working on this problem owned the overall design and drove the solution across all teams involved.
As you can see there is no shortage of opportunities to play a very large and rewarding role in helping Amazon Halo continue to play a vital role in the health and wellness of our customers. Every day we are looking to find new ways to evolve Halo and are looking for bright thinkers, who aren’t afraid to reframe the problem and find unique solutions to support the Halo roadmap. Check here for a list of current openings.
Be well.
