When leaving Amazon, there’s a tradition of writing a LinkedIn post, describing the amazing people and things you’ve learned at Amazon, and how exciting the next opportunity is. (Equally likely: You say that you’re looking forward to a sabbatical to recover from working at Amazon.)
I didn’t do that. I had already sent my farewell email to my colleagues, and it contained a fair amount of inside baseball that wouldn’t translate well to a public post. And while I was excited about SPIRL, I also didn’t have enough to say. I still had to meet most of the team, and my title was new and weird enough that it was difficult to describe what I would do. This didn’t stop Koz, of course: “Oh, you’re going to hand out stickers!”
Now that I’m three months into working at SPIRL, it’s easier to write about the change, and compare and contrast with Amazon. I’ll put it in the form of an FAQ:
Q: What is SPIRL’s product?
A: We offer a SPIFFE-based workload identity system. Read my previous post,“Passports for ghosts”
Q: What does a “community engineer” do, anyway?
A: Whatever is necessary to help SPIRL, SPIRE, the SPIFFE ecosystem, or the cause of workload identity in general. I’ll be able to point to more specific examples in the future. By way of comparison, once you become a principal engineer at Amazon your focus shifts to include the needs of the entire company, and not just your team or organization. In much the same way, my role’s focus is broader than SPIRL’s products alone. The “engineer” part means that I take a technical approach.
Q: Compared to Amazon, what’s it like to work at a startup?
A: The pace is much faster.
Q: What’s the SPIRL team like?
A: Their skills, experience, judgment, and productivity are the best I’ve seen. My current description is that the SPIRL team is like The Crew in a heist movie: A diverse collection of highly professional experts in their particular niche. The big difference is that this crew is working to keep the criminals out.
Q: Why did you leave Amazon?
A: I kept seeing situations where a product like SPIRL’s could help solve persistent, worrisome, and expensive problems. Amazon cares deeply about security, but it has other fish to fry before it gets around to supporting multi-cloud identity in the same way. So in order to help address this, SPIRL is the place to be.
Q: Was it because you didn’t want to come to the office every day?
A: No. I actually prefer working with a team in-person. Even when we only had to be in the office three days a week, I tended to come in more often. Note, however, that most of my meetings were still video calls with team members located elsewhere. My last team was particularly distributed across both coasts. This is the big reason I somewhat grudgingly accept the necessity of remote work: The best people are all over the planet. Insisting that everyone works in the same place means you’ll end up compromising when it comes to hiring, or project assignments.
Q: What do you miss about Amazon?
A: There are a ton of good people I miss working with. You know who you are, and how to reach me if you feel like joining me at SPIRL.
Before I forget, here’s the obligatory “last Amazon laptop and badge” photo:
