11 Years of Growth at Amazon

I joined Amazon in 2014 as a Customer Service Associate, helping customers with their Digital and Devices questions. From day one, I was driven by more than just solving tickets—I wanted to understand the bigger picture. I pushed myself to learn every system, took on additional responsibilities, and actively sought feedback to improve. That hunger to grow and contribute at a higher level defined my early years at Amazon.

By 2016, I'd earned a promotion to Team Manager, responsible for 60 associates with weekly 1-on-1s and performance reviews. This is where my technical journey truly began. While managing the day-to-day operations, I taught myself SQL and Excel after hours, diving into our metrics to uncover patterns nobody else was seeing. I started building reports that revealed the real story behind our performance—not just surface-level numbers, but actionable insights that drove change. Balancing leadership responsibilities with self-directed technical learning became my defining trait.

Then I was released from people management entirely to chase something nobody could explain: 30,000 contacts a week being misreported. I ruled out agent behavior through contact sampling, traced the root cause to a communication failure between two upstream systems, and drove the fix across two engineering teams that didn't report to me, taking the volume to zero. That investigation is what moved me into analytics. In 2018 I became a Business Analyst, supporting 12+ functions across Amazon Customer Service and owning the full A/B testing lifecycle, from data collection design through statistical analysis, achieving up to 50% improvement in response rates. By June 2019 I had moved into data engineering.

For the five years that followed, I owned production contact routing on Amazon Connect: the contact flows themselves and the data layer behind them, with routing decisions spanning queue, agent skill, language, and priority. A large part of that job was keeping attribution correct across an interconnected multi-organization flow network, so that millions of daily contacts reached the organization that owned them rather than leaking into another team's queues. Which is to say the problem I was handed as a team manager is the same class of problem I spent the next five years responsible for preventing, at millions of contacts a day. Both ends of the same career, eleven years apart.

I left Amazon in April 2026 after 11 years. Since then I've started and run Tanner's Work, a residential services business, and built its entire production stack myself: infrastructure, API, payments, security, and front end. I intend to keep running it, but data and software engineering is the work I'm returning to. Being the only person on call for a real system with real customers has taught me more than any course could, and I'm looking for the next place to apply all of it.