Day in the Life of an Amazon Software Engineer

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Realistic Day in the Life as an Amazon Software Engineer in Vancouver
This is a very realistic day in the life of an amazon software engineer in Vancouver, which includes a tour of the building work areas, kitchen, and even an outdoor basketball court.

Given how sunny it is in Vancouver, I let the sun rain on my skin to naturally wake me up. Unfortunately I still don’t have a bed frame because as a software engineer believe in a minimalist style. My morning routine consists of my brushing, shaving my beard, and washing my face. Then I grab breakfast, and head over to the office, which is a thrilling 20 minute train ride from where i live. I usually try to stop by starbucks then tend to important reach outs from the team while I am waiting. It’s usually quite crowded in the morning at the skytrain until about 9 am, so today it wasn’t too bad.

Anyhow, I make my way to the office, where our day starts with a morning stand-up meeting. It's like a daily code huddle where we discuss yesterday's achievements and today's quests. For me, last few days I’ve been on call, which essentially means I help deal with customer emergencies. In this case, we need to scale out some of the storage for a company that is experiencing a lot of traffic.

So today we are moving to the post, a new office building in Vancouver. In the post, we have personal lockers via our card key, typical conference rooms, phone rooms and a brand new kitchen. We even have an area for dogs to stay in the new office. For today’s lunch I go to my usual place nearby called Viet sub. I like to try and eat at an open area, where I can enjoy my sandwich while debugging code. Because I am on call, Im trying to help out a customer, who can sometimes be in different time zones, which brings certain challenges where you might be called at later times during the day. For the rest of the day, we try to figure out how to make the traffic experience better for the customer. It's like optimizing an algorithm, but for the real world. Two super helpful features at the office are the ability to whiteboard and write down my thoughts and using a standing desk. After all, I'm coding my way to fitness.

I usually end off my night by working on my AI ethics course for my online masters degree. I think the most important part of tech is that it’s always changing, and I am a firm believer that AI will change the way we live our lives in the future, so we have to consider both the benefits as well as safety of utilizing it.