Q&A with Jorge Paez, Senior SDE for Amazon Flex

Everyone, meet Jorge 👋 Jorge Paez is a Senior SDE for Amazon Flex, where people can use their own vehicle to deliver packages for Amazon as a way of earning extra money to move closer to their goals. Jorge has been at Amazon for 6 years, working within the Last Mile organization throughout his time here. At Amazon, Jorge has had the opportunity to develop personally and professionally while facing new and interesting challenges and working on software ranging from app and web development all the way to big data processing passing server side development and infrastructure as code.

What is your favorite Amazon memory?

My favorite memory at Amazon is from my very first assignment. My task was to productize a tool created by a scientist on our team to optimize the dispatch of packages at Last Mile warehouses. This tool was running in hundreds of sites in multiple countries. Our team knew it would further improve our business and deliver value to our customers. This project showed me the value of Amazon’s Day 1 Culture during my own personal Day 1 period. I personally see Day 1 as prioritizing the delivery of customer value and as Amazon being a big company composed of a lot of start ups working together to do that.

Which accomplishments at Amazon are you most proud of?

About a year into my Amazon career, my team took ownership of multiple systems that needed problem solving. This slowed down new projects and made our on-call rotation really rough for work life balance. It was not sustainable. So, we rallied as a team to really understand our systems and come up with ideas to improve them. We would have “Beers and Boards” which has a weekly team happy hour were we would have a drink and share our learnings from new issues or code explorations. Also, our leadership created space in our backlog to prioritize these ideas. This allowed us to tackle bottlenecks in the system, deprecated unnecessary services, improve our processes, enhanced our instrumentation, and most importantly held the new parts our software to the Highest Standards. Today our team owns these same services (or new versions for them) and we still have an on-call rotation, but pages in the middle of the night are rare events nowadays.

Jorge, what excites you about your role and team?

I am excited by opportunities to work on software that impacts the real world. A lot of the opportunities in the Software world only impact the virtual plane, but at Amazon Flex we are presented with the opportunity to work on solutions that impact the real world in many ways. For instance, through our logistics systems many customers are able to receive products they need when they otherwise would not be able to. This became particularly evident during the pandemic when Amazon was a key part of how people adjusted to spending more time at home. Also, Amazon Flex has a clear impact on our drivers’ lives by presenting them with more flexible opportunities to increase their income. I have friends and family that use Amazon Flex as a main source of income, and others who use it as a stepping stone in their career. Seeing how the software my team and I work on daily impacts these lives keeps me motivated and excited whenever I open my laptop.

How important is working in a diverse team and what value does it bring?

I have learned throughout my career the importance of “putting people first.” I’m lucky to work with very smart professionals everyday, but I’m even luckier to work in a team where we welcome our teammates as different people with different backgrounds. We take the time and create the spaces to know who we see at the office every week. For example, for a while we would name our sprints after foods and one of us would bring that food at the end of the Sprint. When it was my turn to name a sprint, we called it the Arepa Sprint. So, at the end of the sprint I stayed late with my wife cooking arepas so we could set up a self-service Arepa station at the office. We also had toppings that took into account different diets from our colleagues. Ultimately, I was able to share my culture and foster an inclusive environment by introducing my teammates to a plate that means as much to me personally as it does for my Venezuelan background. I feel welcomed by my peers due to our inclusive environment. For instance, my team knew that my family and I were going on a road trip from Austin to Miami to visit our extended family and friends with our new baby when I went on parental leave. So, when I came back to the office, my team had set up my desk with flamingos, beach balls, and palm trees so that I didn’t miss Florida too much while ramping back up. It’s the little interactions like swapping on-call when someone has concert tickets, keeping in mind a teammate’s long planned vacation when setting up the sprints, or understanding and respecting each others background’s when discussion ideas for a project that allow us enjoy and benefit from the diversity in our team. We are able to tackle our projects from many angles because we respect and value the fact that our many backgrounds let us seeing from different points of views.

Jorge, what do you do for fun and how do you balance work and life?

I try to track and budget my time both at work and home. I use some tools and tricks that I’ve learned from my mentors. For instance, I use apps to track what windows I spend the most time on to make sure that I stay focus on my daily goals. I also prioritize the most important tasks first thing in the morning and avoid multitasking as much as possible. This set of approaches helps me live in the present moment and also do my best on the task at hand by purely focusing on the “next right thing." Outside of work I enjoy working out, playing Magic The Gathering, reading non-fiction books and Marvel comics, attending live events, playing sports with my kids, and planning family trips. The trip planning in particular is a family hobby; we are much more about the journey than the destination, and we enjoy the excitement and anticipation as we research the places we want to visit and the activities we want to do. Lastly, there are plenty of opportunities in Austin to catch cool events like the Austin FC game, the Formula 1 GP, ACL, and many other shows throughout the year that our family enjoys.

What is your favorite leadership principle and why?

It is tricky to pick a favorite leadership principle because one of my favorite aspects is the tensions created while finding a balance between seemingly conflicting principles. For example, it is common to struggle finding a balance between Bias for Action and Insisting on the Highest Standards when engineers have to find the sweet spot between shipping a project when it is good enough but without cutting corners. With that said, if I have to pick just one it would be Earns Trust. It is a lot easier to shoot for the stars when you trust that your teammates and leaders will have your back if something doesn’t go as planned. Similarly, it is simpler for a team to be “greater than the sum of its parts” when each person can focus on individual tasks trusting that the rest of the team will take care of their parts as well. In work relationships, like other relationships in our lives, trust is the key. Trusting my team has been a key part of my Amazon experience.

What’s your current project about — and are you hiring?

We are working on multiple projects that are focused on making it easier for our Flex drivers see the best offers in more convenient ways. We are hiring SDEs for our Android and iOS teams, as well as for our back-end teams.

It is Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept 15 to Oct 15). Jorge, why do you think it is important to celebrate it?

For the most part, this is just another month for us, we don’t have traditions specific to Hispanic Heritage Month. We eat arepas at least once a week, sing karaoke, dance to Latin music, and do our best to speak Spanish (I would say Spanglish is our official language) as a family at home. However, we do enjoy having the spotlight on the Hispanic Culture which allows for things like “El Tiny” from NPR or Hispanic artists being featured at local events and exhibitions. With that said, what’s quickly becoming my favorite aspect of Hispanic Heritage month is my kids getting extra exposure to other Hispanic cultures that have similar traditions at home but with slight cultural differences.

Wow — thanks for sharing your Amazon story with us, Jorge!