What is a Principal Engineer at Amazon (Staff column)
I watched something interesting this weekend. podcast About principal engineers from Gergely Orosz, the author of the newsletter "The Pragmatic Engineer". To discuss this topic, Gergely was joined by Steve Huynh, a former principal engineer at Amazon. 17- summer experience in the company. Steve has worked on many projects, from the first Kindle to Prime Video, including in-book search, payments, Amazon Local, restaurants and sports broadcasts. In 2024 He left Amazon to develop a YouTube channel.A Life Engineered".
Below are the main ideas of the interview: 1. Difficulty raising to principal engineer level at Amazon Transition from Senior Engineer (L6) principal engineer (L7) Amazon is one of the most complex in the technology industry. Amazon missed the mid-level staff engineer, creating a two-and-a-half-level leap. Steve needed it. 8 years to receive this increase. Despite hundreds of job openings for chief engineers, most candidates do not get promoted on the first try. 2. Amazon's scale and technical challenges Amazon is processing 10,000-100,000Requests per second for critical services. A single request to the Prime Video homepage can generate hundreds of downstream requests to various microservices. Steve talked about the concept of "brownout" - a state where the service is available, but runs slowly or returns partial results. 3. Linking latency to income Amazon measured the direct correlation between page loading delay and revenue – the faster a page loads, the more purchases customers make. This has led to a corporate obsession with performance and optimizing delays. 4. The evolution of architecture: from monolith to microservice n Amazon started out with a monolithic architecture in C++, but faced a limit on how to use it. 4 GB for a binary file in 32- bit system. The move to microservices was a forced scaling solution, but led to compromises in performance. 5. Culture of written documents Amazon is famous for its six-page memo culture (6-pager)It replaced PowerPoint presentations. Meetings begin with 30a minute silent reading of the document, which contributes to a deep understanding of the problems. I like this approach, but it is often difficult to get used to in organizations that prefer to have large meetings to solve any issue. 6. COE process (Correction of Errors) Amazon uses a structured approach to analyzing incidents through COE documents. Unlike conventional post-mortems, COE focuses on corrective actions, not just on documenting failures. I didn’t fully understand the difference between writing post-mortems, as described in Google’s SRE Book. 7. Community of Chief Engineers Amazon has a unique community of chief engineers with their own meetings and slack channel. The high standards for obtaining this level mean that every chief engineer has exceptional skills. 8. Amazon’s Principles of Leadership Steve emphasized the importance of having principles that can be used as axioms to build further reasoning and make decisions at all levels of the company. In terms of specific principles, Steve emphasized the Customer Obsession principle. (client-obsession). 9. Freedom of movement policy Amazon has implemented a "freedom of movement" policy that allows employees to move between teams without being blocked by managers. It created a domestic talent market where bad teams lost people and good teams attracted. 10. Patent strategy Amazon is actively patenting software, having more 15,000 patent applications. A culture of written documents helps convey ideas to lawyers for patenting. The company has a level of patent approval 97.12%.
This interesting interview explores aspects of Amazon’s engineering culture and explains why the company remains attractive to talented engineers despite high demands and an intense work environment.
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