Intro

New blog!

I wanted to start making posts talking about my side projects and compare my time at Amazon and Meta.

Amazon

I joined Amazon right after Thanksgiving in 2017. I spent almost exactly 4 years there spread across three teams:

  1. Alexa Smart Home - I led two teams that were focused on controlling A/V devices like TVs and soundbars.
  2. Amazon Care - I led the mobile and web teams and later droved a reorg that created six vertical feature teams underneath me.
  3. Prime Gaming - I joined the day that they renamed from Twitch Prime. I started out leading the team that was responsible for gaming.amazon.zom and grew my responsibilities to six full stack feature teams.

I become a hiring Bar Raiser during my 3rd year. It was a grueling process, but I learned a lot about interviews and become great at running debrief meetings and making good hiring decisions. I did just over 250 interview during my time there.

I was hired as an L6 SDM, but I managed multiple teams and other managers almost my entire time. I struggled to get my promotion to go through for a variety of reasons, and I left after yet another failed promotion and right before I was due to see a large compensation cliff.

Meta

After a brief "fun-employment" break, I started at Meta in June of 2022. I was hired as an M2, which is equivalent to an L7 Sr. SDM at Amazon (the position I couldn't get promoted to). I joined the Horizon Worlds organization working in the Engine sub-pillar.

I was brought in to lead what was called the Concurrency & Complexity workstream which included the Rendering, Game Server, and Embodiment (player locomotion and interaction) teams.

At the beginning of 2023, I made a pitch to get a new Performance team funded, and I found a tech lead manager and two people to start that team.

There were large Meta layoffs in the first half of 2023, and I took on two more teams after a peer was let go: Travel/Matchmaking & Simulation. At this time, the Performance team was moved to another manager due to my increased scope.

In the first half of 2024, the Embodiment team moved to another org. At that time, I was given headcount to create a new team focused on bringing out application natively to mobile. I hired the initial manager and 6 engineers for that team.

Three months later, the Rendering team moved out as part of a large re-org and the Performance team came back to me.

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