New Career Journey

July 25th, 2025 was my last day as an applied data scientist at Microsoft. August 11th, 2025 is my first day as a software engineer at Amazon. It is by far the largest change in my career. Nearly everything about my day-to-day will change, including but not limited to:

• Company change: Microsoft -> Amazon
• Discipline change: applied data science -> software engineering
• Divisional change: cybersecurity -> operations and logistics
• Communication change: Teams -> Slack & Zoom
• Workflow change: Windows OS -> MacOS

I can’t lie: I’m a little nervous. I’ve spent the past five years working at Microsoft and at this point am very familiar with the practices, rhythm of business and lingo. Amazon has its own completely different set of business practices and lingo that I’ll have to get used to.

That said, I’m also very excited by the opportunity to learn, share expertise from my own career experience, and grow my network. I’ve been fortunate enough to briefly meet some members of the team already. They seem like a great group of people and a brilliant team of engineers.

While a lot will be different, much will also feel familiar. I learned from a meet-and-greet chat that the engineering team works closely with a data science team. I have a good opportunity to be a bridge between the teams due to my experience in both disciplines. While I’m not fully familiar with the AWS versions of services, I’m very familiar with the Azure cloud equivalents as well as the frameworks the team uses.

All-in-all, I must remind myself to use my nervous-excitement as fuel to learn all I can and make a great contribution to my new team.