Een leuk interview met Werner Vogels, de Nederlandse CTO (hoogste technologische baas) van Amazon. Hij spreekt binnenkort op PICNIC hij werd door die organisatie geïntervied. Voor recruitmentmatters interessant omdat er ook kort word ingegaan op hoe hij aan zijn baan bij Amazon is gekomen.

How did you get in touch with Amazon? Were you approached, did you apply, how did that work?

“I was invited by Amazon to give a presentation about my work and have a discussion about the scalability and reliability of the Amazon Technology Platform. Soon after that, I was approached by Amazon for a position. From what I had seen during my visit I realized that Amazon is one the world’s largest distributed systems with a strong innovation culture, and I realized could really make a contribution there. It didn’t take long for me to accept the offer.”

You very quickly took on a leading role in the developments of the various Amazon services. Did you and Jim Bezos compare visions in your job interview? Did you convince him? Do you have team meetings to brainstorm? I am just curious how Amazon arrives at this vision and what role you played..

“The services that we are exposing publically are all the result of an internal need for reducing the complexity of systems overhead that each engineer at Amazon had to deal with . We developed those services first for our internal systems and it wasn’t until we had those in place that we made the decision to also externalize those services. As with everything within Amazon those decisions are a matter of teamwork where there are many different contributors from different disciplines.”