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Andrew Froehlich
Architect for Data Science Engineering and Big Data at Audible
Summit, NJ, United States
Details
Experience:
• Architect and Tech Lead for Data & Information Security organization, owning all big data and science-supporting infrastructure for Audible, including Machine Learning Workflow tooling, Personalization, Search, Customer and Content modeling, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Marketing Technology, and Data Warehouse.
• Technical Lead for Audible's Generative AI initiative, designing the North Star architecture to support short- and long-term Large Language Model (LLM) usage across all organizations.
• Member of the Audible Architecture Board, a small group of Senior Engineers that reviews high-impact technical designs to align with the company’s technical strategy and raise the bar for quality with the authority to reject proposals.
• Lead the technical strategy and annual goal planning across all organizations supporting science infrastructure, co-writing vision/strategy documents/proposals reviewed by Audible’s C-Suite (CEO, CTO, CPO).
• Tech Lead for Marketing Technology, including driving technical strategy, coordinating with technical and non-technical Audible and Amazon stakeholders, and liaising with 3P vendors for build vs. buy strategy.
• Designed Audible’s Data Science Engineering approach to Data Privacy mandates (e.g. CDPR) and Audible's overall architectural strategy to the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulation.
• Used management background to fill in SDM responsibilities when the organization faced attrition, including guiding scrum-team-level quarterly planning and providing additional hands-on mentorship across teams.
• “Learning Champion” for Data & Information Security organization, driving initiatives that encourage continuous learning & development, including coordinating annual in-house AWS Jams, organizing Audible’s annual presence at AWS re : Invent, giving career-path-oriented tech talks, and organizing Audible’s facilitation of SDE Functional Interviewing training courses.
2021 : Present
Audible, Inc.
Software Development Engineer III, Data & Information Security
• Manager of Product Graph Harmonia, part of Amazon's Personalization organization, owning an Amazon knowledge graph for Consumables products and the supporting architecture, data workflows and machine learning models. The team spans two disciplines (SDE and Applied Scientist) and two locations (NYC and Seattle).
• The team utilizes Native AWS data workflows and in-house ML models to extract structured data from unstructured data sources, resulting in more complete product information in the Amazon catalog to be used for richer customer experiences.
• Identified the need to grow our science annotation workforce in-house, laying out a proposal accepted by the Director. Established a new role, “Knowledge Associate”, aligned with the responsibilities required for driving annotations within the science pipeline, grew our in-house annotator to become the Knowledge Associate manager, and fully staffed her two-pizza team.
• Received an Amazon Personalization Org Leadership Award in H2 2020, an acknowledgement awarded to 2-3 individuals biannually for above and beyond contributions to the organization, for launching the Consumables structured metadata data pipeline.
• Over 250 interviews conducted while at Audible/Amazon.
2020 : 2021
Amazon
Software Development Manager III, Product Graph
• Manager of Softlines Fit Shopping Experience team, owning experiences on the Amazon Retail website and mobile app that help customers find the right size/fit for clothing. The team spans three disciplines (SDE, Applied Scientist, and Research Scientist) and two locations (NYC and Seattle).
• Originally managed two development teams in Softlines Fit working on different technical stacks with different road maps. Hired full two-pizza team of developers, starting as the first member of the local team, sourcing mostly through internal Amazon transfers without assistance from HR. After both teams were fully staffed, a second SDM position was opened to allow the two teams to continue to scale.
• Launched first clothing size recommendation and selection experience on Amazon using Machine Learning size prediction, owning the full-stack : front-end, back-end, services, and ML models in Sagemaker.
•Launched first automated size selection on Amazon Softlines Detail Pages backed by customer data.
• Designed high-level full-stack architecture for Virtual Clothing Try-On before development team was hired in order to scope the launch timeline for the first internal beta app, which was delivered on-time (10-month project). Virtual Clothing Try-On has now been featured in Amazon's Made For You product, launched December 2020.
• Promoted multiple SDE direct reports including L5 to L6 promotion and one Research Scientist to Senior Research Scientist (L6).
2018 : 2020
Amazon
Software Development Manager III, Softlines Fit
• Manager of the Content Discovery Web team, owning product experiences on the desktop and mobile website (Product Detail Pages, Search and all Browse experiences). Team utilizes agile scrum methodology for software development, organizing backlogs and sprints in JIRA.
• Managed two-year project to fully rebuild the Audible website, previously on two separate stacks for desktop and mobile using legacy Amazon systems, to a single multi-tenant website platform. Influenced the organization to use a major marketplace launch (Canada) as a vehicle for testing and releasing the new architecture rather than adding throw-away work to the existing platform pending deprecation. Canada marketplace released on-time on the Amazon Horizonte platform (Java Spring based) in September 2017, and all other marketplaces finished migration to the new platform by May 2018.
• Managed design, development, and release of highly-available service for storage, retrieval, and aggregation of all Audible reviews and ratings globally, replacing legacy Amazon service pending deprecation.
• Managed multi-month performance deep dive that made the new Audible web platform truly CPU-bound, reducing the host capacity required by over 60% and allowing for the use of EC2 reactive auto-scaling rather than managed scaling.
• Promoted multiple SDE direct reports, including Amazon L5 to L6 promotion.
• One of a handful of people globally at Amazon and all subsidiaries certified to train others to be facilitators in Amazon's SDE Functional Interviewing training (4 hours), a prerequisite course for conducting SDE interviews at Amazon; personally trained over 500interviewers while at Audible/Amazon.
2016 : 2018
Audible, Inc.
Senior Software Development Manager, Discovery
• Developed for the Audible website, an Amazon Santana platform based on Java Spring using Amazon Web Services, utilizing the Agile Scrum methodology.
• Used Java, JavaScript/jQuery, and Amazon/AWS services/tools to develop and maintain Content Discovery functionality, including Product Detail Pages and all Search and Browse Experiences.
• Tech Lead and main point of contact for Content Discovery Web team, working with product management for prioritization and making final technical decisions for the team.
• Led scrums, sprint grooming/planning, and retrospectives for Content Discovery team as Scrum Master.
• Led design, development, and release of Audible Customizable Product Carousels, which became and continue to be the most prominent tool for marketing and merchandising across prominent Audible web pages, including the Home Page.
• Individually designed, developed, and released infrastructure to attribute audiobook purchases made on the Amazon retail website to the Audible web marketplace, using SQS, SNS, and microservices.
• Discovered, triaged, and fixed a long-standing (multi-year) bug with cart and checkout functionality, bringing time complexity down from quadratic time, O(n^2), to constant time, O(1), based on the number of items in the cart.
• On-call Application Support for the Audible.com Website team and Content Discovery Web team.
• Other accomplishments include : Implemented online audiobook returns; Implemented and integrated client-side metric logging site-wide; Lead developer for redesign of Product Detail and Category pages; Lead web developer for Audible Channels feature until Beta launch; Integrated gamification using 3P Badgeville platform
2012 : 2016
Audible, Inc.
Senior Software Development Engineer
• Technical Lead for Audible's Generative AI initiative, designing the North Star architecture to support short- and long-term Large Language Model (LLM) usage across all organizations.
• Member of the Audible Architecture Board, a small group of Senior Engineers that reviews high-impact technical designs to align with the company’s technical strategy and raise the bar for quality with the authority to reject proposals.
• Lead the technical strategy and annual goal planning across all organizations supporting science infrastructure, co-writing vision/strategy documents/proposals reviewed by Audible’s C-Suite (CEO, CTO, CPO).
• Tech Lead for Marketing Technology, including driving technical strategy, coordinating with technical and non-technical Audible and Amazon stakeholders, and liaising with 3P vendors for build vs. buy strategy.
• Designed Audible’s Data Science Engineering approach to Data Privacy mandates (e.g. CDPR) and Audible's overall architectural strategy to the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulation.
• Used management background to fill in SDM responsibilities when the organization faced attrition, including guiding scrum-team-level quarterly planning and providing additional hands-on mentorship across teams.
• “Learning Champion” for Data & Information Security organization, driving initiatives that encourage continuous learning & development, including coordinating annual in-house AWS Jams, organizing Audible’s annual presence at AWS re : Invent, giving career-path-oriented tech talks, and organizing Audible’s facilitation of SDE Functional Interviewing training courses.
2021 : Present
Audible, Inc.
Software Development Engineer III, Data & Information Security
• Manager of Product Graph Harmonia, part of Amazon's Personalization organization, owning an Amazon knowledge graph for Consumables products and the supporting architecture, data workflows and machine learning models. The team spans two disciplines (SDE and Applied Scientist) and two locations (NYC and Seattle).
• The team utilizes Native AWS data workflows and in-house ML models to extract structured data from unstructured data sources, resulting in more complete product information in the Amazon catalog to be used for richer customer experiences.
• Identified the need to grow our science annotation workforce in-house, laying out a proposal accepted by the Director. Established a new role, “Knowledge Associate”, aligned with the responsibilities required for driving annotations within the science pipeline, grew our in-house annotator to become the Knowledge Associate manager, and fully staffed her two-pizza team.
• Received an Amazon Personalization Org Leadership Award in H2 2020, an acknowledgement awarded to 2-3 individuals biannually for above and beyond contributions to the organization, for launching the Consumables structured metadata data pipeline.
• Over 250 interviews conducted while at Audible/Amazon.
2020 : 2021
Amazon
Software Development Manager III, Product Graph
• Manager of Softlines Fit Shopping Experience team, owning experiences on the Amazon Retail website and mobile app that help customers find the right size/fit for clothing. The team spans three disciplines (SDE, Applied Scientist, and Research Scientist) and two locations (NYC and Seattle).
• Originally managed two development teams in Softlines Fit working on different technical stacks with different road maps. Hired full two-pizza team of developers, starting as the first member of the local team, sourcing mostly through internal Amazon transfers without assistance from HR. After both teams were fully staffed, a second SDM position was opened to allow the two teams to continue to scale.
• Launched first clothing size recommendation and selection experience on Amazon using Machine Learning size prediction, owning the full-stack : front-end, back-end, services, and ML models in Sagemaker.
•Launched first automated size selection on Amazon Softlines Detail Pages backed by customer data.
• Designed high-level full-stack architecture for Virtual Clothing Try-On before development team was hired in order to scope the launch timeline for the first internal beta app, which was delivered on-time (10-month project). Virtual Clothing Try-On has now been featured in Amazon's Made For You product, launched December 2020.
• Promoted multiple SDE direct reports including L5 to L6 promotion and one Research Scientist to Senior Research Scientist (L6).
2018 : 2020
Amazon
Software Development Manager III, Softlines Fit
• Manager of the Content Discovery Web team, owning product experiences on the desktop and mobile website (Product Detail Pages, Search and all Browse experiences). Team utilizes agile scrum methodology for software development, organizing backlogs and sprints in JIRA.
• Managed two-year project to fully rebuild the Audible website, previously on two separate stacks for desktop and mobile using legacy Amazon systems, to a single multi-tenant website platform. Influenced the organization to use a major marketplace launch (Canada) as a vehicle for testing and releasing the new architecture rather than adding throw-away work to the existing platform pending deprecation. Canada marketplace released on-time on the Amazon Horizonte platform (Java Spring based) in September 2017, and all other marketplaces finished migration to the new platform by May 2018.
• Managed design, development, and release of highly-available service for storage, retrieval, and aggregation of all Audible reviews and ratings globally, replacing legacy Amazon service pending deprecation.
• Managed multi-month performance deep dive that made the new Audible web platform truly CPU-bound, reducing the host capacity required by over 60% and allowing for the use of EC2 reactive auto-scaling rather than managed scaling.
• Promoted multiple SDE direct reports, including Amazon L5 to L6 promotion.
• One of a handful of people globally at Amazon and all subsidiaries certified to train others to be facilitators in Amazon's SDE Functional Interviewing training (4 hours), a prerequisite course for conducting SDE interviews at Amazon; personally trained over 500interviewers while at Audible/Amazon.
2016 : 2018
Audible, Inc.
Senior Software Development Manager, Discovery
• Developed for the Audible website, an Amazon Santana platform based on Java Spring using Amazon Web Services, utilizing the Agile Scrum methodology.
• Used Java, JavaScript/jQuery, and Amazon/AWS services/tools to develop and maintain Content Discovery functionality, including Product Detail Pages and all Search and Browse Experiences.
• Tech Lead and main point of contact for Content Discovery Web team, working with product management for prioritization and making final technical decisions for the team.
• Led scrums, sprint grooming/planning, and retrospectives for Content Discovery team as Scrum Master.
• Led design, development, and release of Audible Customizable Product Carousels, which became and continue to be the most prominent tool for marketing and merchandising across prominent Audible web pages, including the Home Page.
• Individually designed, developed, and released infrastructure to attribute audiobook purchases made on the Amazon retail website to the Audible web marketplace, using SQS, SNS, and microservices.
• Discovered, triaged, and fixed a long-standing (multi-year) bug with cart and checkout functionality, bringing time complexity down from quadratic time, O(n^2), to constant time, O(1), based on the number of items in the cart.
• On-call Application Support for the Audible.com Website team and Content Discovery Web team.
• Other accomplishments include : Implemented online audiobook returns; Implemented and integrated client-side metric logging site-wide; Lead developer for redesign of Product Detail and Category pages; Lead web developer for Audible Channels feature until Beta launch; Integrated gamification using 3P Badgeville platform
2012 : 2016
Audible, Inc.
Senior Software Development Engineer
Company:
Audible, Inc.
About
Senior Software Developer with 10+ years of experience with hands-on technical design and development in high-availability, highly scaled applications. 5+ years of experience in managing developers and scientists for cross-functional teams. Strong leadership skills in agile development, interview coaching, project management, hiring/developing technical talent, and technical strategy, with strong hands-on skills in full-stack development, object-oriented design, and AWS. Recent experience and passion for infrastructure supporting science development and machine learning workflows.
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