All Aboard

Today I started the latest chapter in my life. Just started my new job with Amazon, working on Just Walk Out technology. This is a big job change for me. It’s the first time in almost 25 years that I had to interview for a new job. It’s also the first time in almost that long that I made the transition alone.

Prior to Amazon I was at Aurora Innovation. I got there as part of an acquisition. Before that I was at Uber’s ATG subsidiary. I joined that organization, along with the rest of my team, as part of a re-org as Uber decided not to source its own maps from the ground up. I moved to Uber in a similar fashion. Microsoft decided that it wanted out of the map-making business and sold part of Bing Maps to Uber. While I was at Microsoft I spent most of my time in either the Bing Maps org or the Simulations org. Inside (and even between those two orgs) I moved to follow interesting work and advance my career. No (or very informal) interviews, and teams moved together.

This time it’s very different. I’m the only one moving. I had to interview with people I didn’t know and were unfamiliar with my work. Despite the fact that I’ve interviewed ~1500 people over the years, being interviewed was very different. Sure, the experience helped, and Amazon’s interview process was really smooth, but there’s still a lot of pressure.

And now, instead of working on the same things I’ve been working on, or learning new systems with the rest of my team, I’m drinking from the firehose. So much to learn. New technologies. New people. New processes. I can’t wait to see where it leads.