Amazon Alexa's Rapid Expansion: Q&A With Amazon's Smart Home Director

After a week at CES in Las Vegas in January, it was clear to me Amazon’s Alexa is going to be a part of your future. From kitchen appliances to smartwatches to lighting, if it was connected to the Internet, it was connected to the Alexa Voice Service.

Charlie Kindel, Director, Smart Home for Amazon Alexa says they’re expanding rapidly. “In September, we announced we had 3,000 Alexa skills, and today we have over 7,000 Alexa skills. Additionally, there were over 35 announcements from device manufacturers at CES creating Alexa Voice Service products.”

With that much growth comes investment and job opportunities. We asked Kindel to expand on the open positions and detail what it takes to be part of the Alexa team.

You have a lot of open positions, what are you looking for?

We’re investing a lot in Alexa, and have open positions for almost every discipline you can imagine. My team is hiring voice designers, UX designers, machine language scientists, product managers, software development managers, data engineers, and business development people. In terms of the biggest numbers of open positions, it’s all about the engineers. We’re seeking full-stack, front-end, and back-end software development engineers (SDEs) at all levels, including at the principal level. An illustrative sub-set of the open positions on my team can be found here.

Since so much of what Alex does is voice based, are there specific areas of knowledge and expertise required for each position?

The best SDE demonstrates they can pick up any problem domain, any programming language, any technology stack, and any level in that stack and create customer magic through code. So, in general we look for SDEs who are just great software engineers—it doesn’t matter if you’ve had experience with voice-based engineering in the past.

It turns out, engineers who have coded and operated systems that run at the scale Alexa is currently operating at are few and far between. Because of that, it would be silly for us to assume we can hire only SDEs who’ve already built systems at that scale. Instead we focus on how we can help engineers with a desire to be world-class at those skills gain them as they take ownership of parts of Alexa Smart Home.

I mentioned voice designers above. This is a new category and job that has only become more mainstream in the last few years—with Alexa, we created what we call the “VUI” (the voice user interface). Designing for a VUI, and particularly a VUI that doesn’t come with a GUI (graphic user interface), is challenging and rewarding work. This role is quite literally moving the voice-first future forward—which is exciting. The candidates we want to hire are those who want to not only design great VUIs, but also want to be part of defining an entirely new job discipline. Remember back in the 80s when GUI was new? That’s where we are with VUI. It’s Day 1 for VUI designers.

What’s your interview process like?

It depends. For most positions, we begin the process with a phone interview. If there's interest on both sides, we invite the candidate for an on-site interview, typically with the hiring manager and several teammates. Each team is unique, though, and some may have their own variation of the interview process.

You've written about what it takes to be a good product manager and a successful engineer. Can you describe for us your view of the relationship between the two?

At Amazon, we have what we call “customer obsession”—and this is very clearly reflected in how we build and operate our product development organizations.

I’ve tried to build the Alexa Smart Home team around this mental model:

Besides customers, there are two groups of people involved in building tech products: Engineers and everyone else. The engineers actually produce and build the product the end-customer uses. The job of everyone else, especially Product Managers, is to generate clarity and commitment to a purpose so that the engineers can create magic. Great product managers understand the reality: The work that truly matters is that of the engineers. Great product managers do whatever it takes to ensure engineers can write great code benefiting the customer.

That said, a PM’s job is still very important. The PM’s job is to free the engineers to focus on what they are best at: technical invention and execution. They do this by creating clarity around who the customer is, where the customer is, why the customer cares, why it’s important for the business, and when it’s relevant.

How do you create an environment where this can flourish? 

Everyone at Amazon is expected to be a leader, and product managers are no different. I try to structure the organization such that a product manager, teamed with a small team of engineers, has complete ownership of a long-term mission as much as possible…. we keep these teams small.

We use the term “two-pizza-sized” to describe the ideal team size for starting a project; a team that can be fed by about two pizzas. It is stunning what a small team like this can get done to kick-off a major feature or product. From there, as we begin to scale the product or feature toward customer availability, we will add more engineers or product management as needed. We attribute the success of the “pizza teams” to having just the right amount of product management at the beginning of a project to provide a strong vision for the product, with a heavy focus on working backwards from the customer’s wants and needs.

How does your company address diversity in the workplace?

We are a company of builders who bring varying backgrounds, ideas, and points of view to decisions and inventing on behalf of our customers. Our diverse perspectives come from many sources including gender, race, age, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, culture, education, as well as professional and life experience. We are working to develop leaders and shape future talent pools to help us meet the needs of our customers around the world—so this is a big investment for us.

We believe that diversity and inclusion are good for our business, but our commitment is based on something more fundamental than that. It's simply right. Amazon has always been, and always will be, committed to tolerance and diversity. These are enduring values for us, which are reflected in our Leadership Principles, and nothing will change that.