Amazon
“Your margin is my opportunity.” - Jeff Bezos
Amazon
I worked in Amazon’s Tax Organization as a SysDev/Architect - an information security focused role building the technology required for financial and legal audits while maintaining security standards for regulatory compliance.
The Role
I was the captain of my own pirate ship - the only developer on the team. At Amazon, a single developer handling an entire workload is typically a principal-level FTE position, not a contractor role - but that was the scope of responsibility I carried. I wore all the hats: architect, developer, TPM scoping work, coder.
I completed the project list in a fraction of the allocated time by identifying similar dependencies across tasks and remapping the schedule to leverage modular design for reusability.
What I Delivered
- Financial and legal audit infrastructure - Systems that had to satisfy regulatory scrutiny
- Security standards compliance - Building with compliance requirements baked in from the start
- Cross-team international collaboration - Including sensitive bulk communication projects that required coordination across teams and borders
What Amazon Teaches You
The leadership principles exist. Amazon has 16 leadership principles now (14 when I was there). They provide a shared vocabulary for decision-making. Whether they’re consistently applied or selectively invoked depends on the team and the situation - like most corporate values. The framework itself is useful; I’ve carried parts of it forward. The gap between stated principles and lived experience is something every large organization struggles with.
Operational excellence is a discipline. Amazon’s approach to deployment, documentation, and accountability shapes how you think about building anything.
Compliance isn’t optional. When you’re building systems for financial and legal audits, every decision has to be defensible. You learn to think about auditability from the start, not as an afterthought.