Yezhong Xu

A few years ago, I wrote a post on Quora about interview process for Principal Engineer role at Amazon. In that post, I shared my own experiences as the recruiter owning that hiring process, as well as tips from other Principal Engineers who had been through the process. Even today, I get weekly emails and messages from senior engineers who saw that post and want to learn more about the Amazon interview. We often end up talking about more than just Amazon. We discuss career development and interview skills in general. I really enjoy those conversations! Since 2017 (when I wrote the Quora post), Amazon has created several helpful resources to prepare candidates for their interviews. Here below are those "official" interview prep materials. I hope you find them useful. Feel free to share them with your friends who are getting ready for job interviews. The Original Quora post: https://lnkd.in/gGVBsJfn Amazon Interview Prep Repo: https://lnkd.in/gnnanGCz Now that you have a starting point, in coming weeks, I plan to write about the "softer skills" that are hard to measure but can really make a difference in interviews. I will expand on those topics. I will breakdown topics like "technical leadership assessment in interviews", authenticity, dealing with ambiguity, "active listening during interview", and other topics. I will write about 'interview preparation' itself! DM, email me on what other 'non-obvious' topics you want me to write about? PS: I'll try to keep my writing practical and broadly applicable, even though my experience is mostly with Amazon. 😀 #interviewing #careeradvise #careergoals #careertransition #interviewpreparation #interviewtips #principalengineer #amazon #amazoninterview

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A Decade at Amazon - Reflections After a 10-year journey at Amazon, I recently transitioned from a yellow badge to the red corporate employee badge. While there is room for improvement at Amazon, I'm struck by how much I've learned and grown, thanks to Amazon's culture and leaders. In my last 10 years, I've had the opportunity to work across different organizations in stores, AWS, and Alexa as an individual contributor and as a manager in technical program management and engineering disciplines. Some of the most profound lessons that will stick with me include: 1. Following leadership principles unifies a company's culture and boosts productivity. 2. The importance of deep understanding, practice, and insisting on the highest standards. 3. Driving outcomes over empires and being strategically patient yet tactically impatient in pursuing customer obsession. 4. Having an insatiable curiosity and beginner's mindset. 5. Every customer issue represents an upstream process deficiency that needs to be identified and resolved urgently. 6. Prioritizing and tackling the hottest, highest impact items first. 7. Being "green-lighted" doesn't mean risk-free, and transparently calling out risks with projected issue dates. 8. Prioritizing input goals you can control before output goals, and optimizing inputs relentlessly. 9. Goals are directional, not dogmatic, and undershooting or overshooting can be acceptable if customers are delighted. 10. While off-the-shelf solutions can cover 80%, investing in tailored solutions for the remaining 20% is critical. 11. Simplicity, incremental progress, and smart automation are core philosophies. 12. Transparency in prioritization rationale and openness to adjusting the roadmap based on new inputs. 13. Sticking to your strongest points persuades better than attempting to discuss everything. 14. Removing blockers is your responsibility, not someone else's, and committing 100% once a group decision is made. 15. Embracing failures as learning opportunities in complex operations. This enriching decade has been about customer obsession, frugality, ownership, never stopping learning, highest standards, and delivering robust solutions. I'm grateful for the growth I've experienced here.

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🚀 Exciting Opportunity Alert 🚀 Are you a Principal Engineer passionate about Distributed Machine Learning? Check out this role in Santa Clara, CA: https://bit.ly/3Zl5M4O. Key skills: #gpu #apache #spark #machinelearing #ml #dl #deeplearning #acceleratedcomputing #cluster #rapids #mLlib #XGBoost #PyTorch #cuML #pytorch #tensorflow #apis #api #Kubernetes #YARN #Ray #C++ #Scala, #Python #nvtabiular #cuda #horovod #petastorm #dll. Interested? Reach out to RobKemp@Nvidia.com for more details. Opportunity awaits! 🌟 #engineering #machinelearning #distributedcomputing

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I've been at Amazon a long time. When I talk about my career with Amazon, the most frequent questions people ask me are: What kept me with Amazon for so many years? When I left after nearly 14 years, what drew me away? What brought me back 2 years later? The genuine answer to each, as trite as it sounds, is the same: it's the people The people who took a chance on me. The people that, when I struggled, helped me lean on my strengths and shore up my weaknesses. The people who saw potential and invested in me. The people who modeled the value of building relationships, not just building code. The people who challenged me, made me think differently, and helped me grow. As I've grown in my career it's also those people in whom I can see potential and invest, where I might take a chance to give them an opportunity, for whom my experience could be of some value as they grow, and with whom I can continue building lasting relationships. I've been with Amazon's Global Talent Management and Compensation for about a year and a half, where our mission is to help Amazonians build rewarding careers. In that time, I've met with hundreds of people in our org and every single one of them has been driven by our mission and passionate about how we can meaningfully improve the lives of every Amazon employee. I've learned so much about how challenging, rewarding, and important taking a culture-first approach can be. This post isn't a claim that Amazon is objectively unique, I know there are amazing people in every company, though it has been my personal experience that Amazon's intentionally peculiar culture is one that encourages these kinds of behavior in people. Rather, my point is this: To deliver sustained business and customer value, your organization cannot be a feature factory. It needs to be an organizational engine that continuously inspects and adjusts its culture to grow people and relationships, according to your values, and through which you deliver for your customers. #people #relationships #culture #amazon

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Software Development Manager opening! Check out the link in the post below to learn more.

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The year 2022 was a time of transition as the world was still trying to settle down in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was during this period that I made the biggest career move of my life - I joined Amazon. Today marks my 2-year #Amaversary, and I couldn't be more grateful for the amazing journey that has unfolded since then. Back then, I had no idea what surprises were in store for me, but so far, it has been an incredible experience. Amazon is all about "Work Hard, Have Fun, and Make History," and I have fully embraced this spirit. The Amazon culture is truly unique, and it's essential to learn the art of unlearning and relearning when starting your Amazon journey to navigate it successfully. Over the past two years, I've been amazed by the many peculiarities that define the Amazon way of working. Those who don't know; below are a few: Metrics: “It changed by X%, from Y to Z”. At Amazon, everything is measured by metrics—from project launches and prioritization to operational excellence and peak planning. Success and failure are both evaluated based on data-driven metrics; yes, failure too. Writing: Writing the Amazon way is hard but efficient. Whether it’s a technical or non-technical document, you need time, effort, and iterations to meet high standards. It's a skill that takes time to develop. Working backwards: How often would it have happened that you took some goal without a target date, started working on it, but slowly and eventually you lost track of or interest in something that was important at one point? In Amazon, we set a target date and then plan backwords to meet that target. It is just shifting the order in which we typically work. Trust me, it's very powerful and changes everything. DFD (Dates-for-Date): Since I talked about working backwords, date is important. “When is this going to be done?” If the answer is not a precise date, you give a DFD, which means you will come back with a precise date by DFD. We always answer a question about dates with a date or a date-for-a-date. Beyond these peculiarities, Amazon’s culture is something that makes it stand out among other companies. Amazon’s culture is very thoughtfully defined, and that’s the reason Amazon has survived for 30 years. Our unique Amazon culture is described by our leadership principles: Customer Obsession, Ownership, Think Big, Invent and Simplify, Insist on High Standards , Learn and Be Curious, Bias for Action, and many others. Our Leadership Principles describe how Amazon does business, how leaders lead, how engineers create products used by millions, and how we keep the customer at the center of our decisions. I am so grateful for the wealth of learning and looking forward to many more with the bunch of extremely talented people who surround me. Cheers to my 2-year #Amaversary! 🥂 #amazon #workhard #havefun #makehistory #itsalwaysday1

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+1. The only goal for engineering productivity measurement should be to help improve developer happiness by identifying pain points and fixing them.

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** Unfortunate Experience with Amazon: Seeking Guidance ** On March 30, 2024, I placed an order with Amazon for a Boat neckband and Boat earbuds. While the neckband arrived in good condition, the earbuds turned out to be defective upon receipt. Naturally, I initiated a return order, and the defective earbuds were collected on April 19, 2024. However, over a month later, I'm still awaiting my refund. Each time I reach out to customer support, I'm told an investigation is ongoing, and worse, I've been accused of potentially returning a different item. Despite their agent verifying and collecting the item, I continue to face delays and blame for an issue that's beyond my control. I filed a complaint on the consumer portal, only to receive a response stating that the product wasn't returned, despite confirmation from their own agent. Here's an excerpt from their communication: "Dear Sir, On review of your complaint and on the information received from the third-party seller we find that you have not returned the product delivered to you vide Order Id 403-8363294-1083540. Accordingly, neither refund nor replacement order can be initiated. Please note that the seller initiates refund only after receipt of the original product as per return policy. Further, it is submitted that our role is limited to that of an intermediary and we are not the seller/manufacturer of the products listed on our e-commerce marketplace. The products listed on our e-commerce marketplace are sold by independent third-party sellers. In view of the above, the issue stands closed. Thank You." I find myself at an impasse and seek your guidance. What steps would you recommend I take next in this scenario? Your insights and advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. #CustomerService #AdviceNeeded #AmazonExperience #boat

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🚀 Join Nvidia's team as a Senior System Software Engineer specializing in Apache Spark! Data scientists rely on you to power through ML experiments. Explore this opportunity in Santa Clara, CA: https://bit.ly/4gn8H2I #gpu #apache #cilium #spark #acceleratedcomputing #restapis #csp #kubernetes #apachespark #rapids #microservices #springboot #kyuubi #zookeeper #gRPC #api #helm #publiccloud #privatecloud #python #scala #databricks #amsemr #gcp #dataproc #azure #synapse #apacheranger #iceberg #deltalake #jupyter #zeppelin #sparkconnect #bitools #pytorch #tensorflow #sparkml #XGBoost For more details, contact RobKemp@Nvidia.com.

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When the Lights Go Out, the Learning Continues As the Puget Sound area faces power outages, I’ve taken the downtime as an opportunity to reflect and document my journey of learning system architecture. It’s a reminder of the importance of resilience—whether in systems or life. Here’s an article documenting key lessons and strategies I’ve gathered along the way. Welcome to any feedback 😀 #software engineer

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During Prime Day 2018, significant parts of the Amazon Store were down for about 3 hours during the busiest shopping day of the year. It was a fascinating study in real-world systems architecture at scale: a sale item that was particularly popular caused a hot partition in a massive distributed hashtable, and this started a multi-level retry storm that brought many, many, many thousands of servers to their knees. I was here at the time, and I remember following the real-time investigation glued to my screen as details unveiled. If you want to know more, Jim Roskind has a really good reInvent talk where he gets into the technical details (https://lnkd.in/gbabs2dP). Amazon being Amazon, we took this failure as an opportunity to improve: rearchitected a lot of our systems, focusing on handling congestion, rethinking the way we retried failures, restricting unbounded queues, and, of course, load and stress testing. I was the Lead for Load and Performance Testing Infrastructure at Amazon at the time, so I found myself in the perfect middle of all this. It was a fascinating time!

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𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐈 𝐚𝐭 𝐀𝐦𝐚𝐳𝐨𝐧 (𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐧𝐧𝐚𝐢) 𝐶𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑝𝑎𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚 𝑀𝑎𝑛𝑎𝑔𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑗𝑜𝑖𝑛 𝑂𝑃𝑇𝐼𝑀𝐴 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑧𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑝𝑝𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑐𝑢𝑡𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔-𝑒𝑑𝑔𝑒 𝐴𝐼! 𝐁𝐞 𝐚 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫: Drive the roadmap for HiTL annotation tooling, shaping the future of AI-powered shopping. 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭: Work closely with teams across operations, software development & privacy to ensure flawless execution. 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚-𝐃𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬: Prioritize roadmap features using metrics & insights, maximizing impact for our customers. 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐨: Lead flawless launches, manage expectations, and keep stakeholders informed. 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫? - 3+ years of experience leading successful programs/projects. - Proven ability to collaborate across tech & non-tech teams. - Experience using data & metrics to drive process improvements. - Strong communication & stakeholder management skills. 𝐁𝐨𝐧𝐮𝐬 𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫: - PMP certification and a Master's degree. - Experience building robust processes & managing project schedules. 𝑅𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑎 𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑢𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝐴𝐼 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑝𝑝𝑖𝑛𝑔? 𝐴𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑦 𝑛𝑜𝑤! #amazoncareers #optima #programmanager #ai #chennai #india

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I first joined Amazon in December of 2005. Even though I left for two years, my "Amaversary" still coincides with the end of the year and a natural moment for reflection. As I reached my 17 year mark this December, I also had the privilege of working with Amazon Careers to share some of my journey and thoughts about individual contributor technical leader and people manager career paths. In my ruminating, I put together far more content than could be used for a single article. So, I've decided to post here as a series of Q&As - in case others might find my observations, experiences, and perspectives interesting or useful. Below is the first of 6. 1. 𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙛𝙡𝙮 𝙨𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙘𝙖𝙧𝙚𝙚𝙧 𝙟𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙣𝙚𝙮; 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙢𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙤𝙣 𝙙𝙞𝙛𝙛𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙖𝙧𝙚𝙚𝙧 𝙥𝙖𝙩𝙝𝙨, 𝙄𝘾 𝙫𝙨 𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙖𝙜𝙚𝙧? I started my career as a software engineer 25 years ago. I've worked for startups, enterprise companies, and 7 different organizations over 17 years and two tours at Amazon. I've written firmware for robotic camera mounts; built highly scalable distributed systems; designed restaurant marketing, ordering, logistics, and operations software; created automated test harnesses for mobile games; tested HD DVD encoding; helped launch grocery delivery to customers around the globe - just to name a few of the many cool things I've had the privilege to work on. I've been an entry-level software engineer, a technical lead of teams, a software manager on a couple of occasions, chief software architect reporting to a CTO, and (for the last few years) Amazon Principal Engineer directly supporting a VP with about 200 engineers within my remit. I first became a manager because I mistakenly thought it was the only way to continue growing as a leader, and in many ways I failed. I learned some very humbling lessons about leadership through that experience, which I used to be a better individual contributor technical leader on my path to Senior Engineer. My second time as manager was because my organization had a need that I could fill. I had grown enough as a leader that this time I was much more successful. I said yes to an opportunity that started with managing a small team through delivery of a complex and critical project. Once I grew a high performing team that delivered that initial project, I took on more scope and expanded into multiple teams. After a couple of years of success growing and investing in my teams so that we could deliver greater value to our customers and business, I decided to prioritize being close to my family. For me, at that time, it meant giving up my people management role and returning to the role of an individual contributor technical leader that supports a globally distributed organization. Even though I really enjoyed my time as a people manager, there is no better job for me than that of a Principal Engineer. #amazon #careerdevelopment #technicalleadership #peoplemanagement

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My Journey to Securing 7 Offers for Management and IC Roles Across FAANG and Startups I’ve been considering opportunities beyond Amazon since 2020, but I was fortunate to be offered enriching experiences year after year, which kept me from making the leap. By early 2024, after laying the foundations for AWS App Studio, I decided to explore other roles within #Amazon. However, I realized that Amazon’s presence in the Bay Area was shrinking, and with its #RTO policies, the management opportunities in #bayarea were limited to just a few roles, none of which aligned with my interests and goals. A combination of limited internal opportunities, and changes in Amazon culture and policies, motivated me to explore external options. Initially, I had two interviews with a FAANG company and a startup, but I failed them miserably. Securing new interviews proved difficult due to factors like scarce roles, high competition, and increasing expectations in both technical and people-management skills. I quickly realized I needed to make every interview count by preparing more methodically and strategically. In a future post, I’ll dive into how I: a) Adjusted my job search to land new interviews consistently b) Staggered my interview timeline to maximize preparedness and increase the likelihood of receiving multiple offers c) Prepped for technical skills, as many companies now expect managers to be as technically competent as senior engineers I also decided to interview for individual contributor (IC) roles for several reasons: a) I’m still hands-on with my side projects b) Companies are reducing management layers c) I enjoy both IC and management roles d) Compensation for ICs at some companies can be higher than for managers at others e) Since I was preparing for technical interviews anyway, I figured I might as well explore IC opportunities too I segmented my job search into four categories: Startup/FAANG and IC/Management, staggering my applications to focus on startups first and then #FAANG. This approach created an avalanche effect: I started receiving IC and management offers from startups, followed by multiple FAANG offers across both IC and management roles. Here are the benefits of this approach: a) I was able to fairly evaluate startup opportunities without bias toward cash components. One startup came close to winning me over, but by that point, I had FAANG offers and ultimately decided to pursue those. b) I gave myself a chance to objectively reconsider an IC role, as I’m still mid-career c) I ensured that for any managerial role I considered, the company culture and its policies aligned well with my values. d) This approach helped me negotiate effectively and secure a top-of-market compensation package. e) I was at my best in the final interviews (both FAANG and startups) after having multiple real-world practice sessions with other companies.

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Reminder: I'm doing a webinar today at 5pm PST on creating and succeeding in high-performance teams. I'll share the tips and tricks I've learned to make my team in the top-25th percentile of all Amazon teams across key dimensions like Manager Satisfaction, Job Satisfaction, Team Culture, and others, as measured by our internal polling, while still delivering large-scale projects within 5% of target dates and driving key value for the IMDb organization. Register here: https://lnkd.in/ezEQiwsJ #TeamCulture #Career #Leadership

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Check out our blog post with Fengyu Zhang and Birjodh Singh Tiwana on how we are incorporating dwell based signals to improve feed experience for LinkedIn members. Thanks to Siddharth Dangi, James Sorenson, Allison Liu, Hailing Cheng, and Yafang Yang for their discussions, data analysis and prior work. https://lnkd.in/gmkSzPWn #linkedin #deeplearning #ai #feed

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