Hundreds of thousands of orders are placed on Amazon websites across the world on a daily basis.
The worldwide operations software development teams own and develop software systems that form the backbone of Amazon's world-class global fulfillment platform. WWOPS houses multiple development teams (Supply Chain Systems, Fulfillment Center Systems, Transportation, Customer Service Technology, Reverse Logistics) that come together in order to deliver large scale distributed systems to ensure seamless customer experience. Typical technical problems include building software services & systems that support high volume transactions, rapid scaling, and implementing complex optimization algorithms in an ever changing environment.
The nature of business demands and rapid changes to the network require agile software development strategies with short development cycles. This also means that engineers get to see the impact of their changes immediately.
Amazon has a complex network of warehouses that store millions of items. One of the goals of the supply chain team is inventory optimization while reducing costs & meeting commitments made to our customers. With the dynamic business environment at Amazon, the systems need to be robust and reliable to integrate new features (for example, adding a new warehouse to the network). The team tackles complex graph problems in order to solve supply chain problems such as shipping options for our customers for every single available item on the Amazon websites.
Central to Amazon's fulfillment network are facilities where we store inventory and fulfill customer orders. These Fulfillment Centers (FC) are distributed across the world and some of them are bigger than several cricket fields together. Large volumes of shipments are managed daily in these fulfillment centers, feeding Amazon's vast fulfillment network. The workflow for an item in an FC includes receipt from a vendor, storage, picking it as part of an order, packing it into a box, obtaining a shipping label, and finally sorting it to the correct location to move it onto a truck for delivery. The FC software systems team designs software that manages various stages of the workflow. The software has to be:
Scalable: Items shipped every hour, add new
warehouses & inventory.
Adaptable:Nothing
is constant except change. New processes are introduced every
year.
The team in India owns software that performs physical space management in the FCs, considering the type and size of the item as well as how fast it moves. The team also owns dock management, which deals with the operations performed while loading and unloading trucks. Finally, the team works on inventory management and QA for all FC software systems and processes.
Amazon recently received the highest customer loyalty ranking based on the Satmetrix 2011 Net Promoter Industry Benchmarks, a widely used methodology measuring customer experience. Customer satisfaction is one of the primary drivers of the organization. Our excellent record relies on motivated customer service associates who interact with software systems that guide them through every customer contact. The customer service technology team in India develops the software that manages customer contacts gathers data from the entire workflow of an order (from order placement to package delivery), aggregates & displays it to Amazon customer service associates. The team is also responsible for customer notification experience: for each order placed on Amazon, the customer receives follow-up email confirmations (order, shipment confirmations etc).
Amazon ships millions of items daily to over 100 countries worldwide. The items vary in shape and size, come with different attributes and shipping restrictions, and have different delivery requirements. There are many ways one can acquire items from vendors, and then move them to customers' doors as per the promise made to the customer, using different carriers and facilities. One can imagine a dense network with source, intermediate and destination nodes, with arcs between them representing paths that customer packages can take. The nodes and arcs are governed by business rules that define their capacity, restrictions on what they can and cannot process, and the time and cost. Amazon transportation's primary focus is optimizing and operating this worldwide network to minimize cost and maximize delivery performance. Along with growth comes changes to how we operate our transportation network, from managing and running our own carriers and trucks, from multi-sort,multi-leg optimization to managing visibility across the network.
The changing nature of business requirements and the ever increasing volume of items make this an exciting space to design and develop scalable and flexible software systems.
At Amazon India, we own several systems and services that make up various parts of the transportation network. We own services that perform validation and correction of shipping addresses. We provide interfaces that process shipping requests and produce shipping labels for a variety of clients. Our systems manage electronic communication with partnered carrier systems. We own systems that record, measure and report delivery performance, and provide feedback into the network based on the findings. The transportation network is constantly expanding and changing, and we also own the processes and software that expands the network and integrates new carriers, services and geographies.
The team supports development of software and processes for reverse logistics that gear inventory control and better cost recovery. The group consists of three teams - Customer Returns (dealing with product returns from customers), Vendor Returns (dealing with supporting worldwide Amazon buyer community in return of inventory back to vendors) and Warehouse Deals (dealing with the sale of used/refurbished products in Amazon marketplace and www.warehousedeals.com). All three teams work together and are primarily responsible for building, enhancing, improving efficiency, monitoring & supporting various reverse logistics software systems and processes deployed worldwide.
TopThe Transaction Risk Management Services (TRMS) team at Amazon safeguards all Amazon Marketplaces from Fraudulent and Abusive practices and in doing so ensures long-term buyer, seller and other stakeholders' satisfaction and builds trust. The team does this by employing a combination of Automated and Manual Investigations into the transactions taking place on the Buying and selling platforms at Amazon.
TopThe seller services technology team builds services & applications that enable third party retailers to sell on the Amazon e-commerce platform.
Amazon WebStore is a comprehensive, full-featured e-commerce product that enables companies of all sizes to build and operate their own e-commerce business. It also powers large e-commerce websites such as Marks & Spencers & MotherCare by delivering rich features & design flexibility necessary to build & operate high volume retail websites. The team works on problems related to search engine optimization (SEO), personalization, international commerce, self-service design widgets and externalization via Amazon Web Services. The team also builds systems that involve synthesizing large amounts of data and apply predictive models and complex business rules into the demand generation engine.
Have you ever noticed the “See more buying choices” or “New & Used offers” while you’re shopping on Amazon? Maybe you’ve sold an old textbook or extra movie yourself. Selling on Amazon is one of the fastest growing businesses at Amazon.com with more than a third of all items currently sold originating from 3rd party Sellers. The Amazon Marketplace organization drives this business and develops solutions that enable millions of sellers around the world to sell on Amazon’s Marketplaces. These solutions include the software platform and applications that enhance demand generation, enable customer acquisition, seller integration, customer relationship management, business analytics, and the inventory and order management functions necessary for sellers to manage their business online at Amazon.com.
With Amazon Webstore, you can set up and manage your eCommerce business backed by the power of Amazon to run your site, expand your business and grow your sales. Amazon Webstore provides powerful eCommerce solutions that grow with your business, without requiring hardware investments or long term contracts.
Amazon Webstore delivers ongoing feature upgrades and support for complementary services from Amazon and third-party solutions, including social media storefronts, financial integration, SEO and email marketing. To know more visit, http://webstore.amazon.com/
The Sales Technology team in Seller Services org is creating a new product aimed at generating significant revenues for Amazon.com and at the same time enabling the company to be able to take strategic decisions for long term investments in new markets. The product would help the sales team in identifying, contacting and converting potential Sellers for the different products that Amazon Services offer.
The product has been recently started and is in the initial stages. This product will comprise of an engineering team mostly based out of Hyderabad. The engineers are expected to not just release the product, but also to contribute significantly in the overall scope and ideation process. The engineers should possess a very high degree of problem solving skills to formulate innovative solutions to the complex issues the product faces. Technically, the engineering team will be working on JAVA, Tomcat and MySQL. Hibernate, Spring and such related frameworks are being used currently. The product would have and an extremely huge volume of data in the database with high traffic to support on the frontend. The system is going to be multi-threaded and distributed.
Amazon’s Seller Services organization is one of the fastest growing businesses within Amazon. There are over 3 million Sellers, ranging from students selling their text books to nation-wide retail chains, selling on Amazon’s international marketplaces. Collectively, these Sellers are responsible for selling about 50% of all items ordered from Amazon.com world-wide and will generate several billion in sales this year alone. The revenue and free cash flow generated by the Seller Services business are at the same proportions.
Our system is a massively scaled e-commerce system that is a critical factor to the success of Amazon, as well as our Sellers worldwide. For 2012 (and beyond) the team expects to grow the Amazon Marketplace Seller Business around the world. The long term vision is that any Seller anywhere can start selling items in less than 60 seconds to consumers anywhere from any Amazon marketplace with the ability to deliver the same great Amazon customer experience. This is an already-large business that is continuing to grow at a high rate year-over-year and we have several new initiatives that will further accelerate this trend. The team is investing heavily in building a highly scalable global platform that can handle millions of transactions every month worth billions of dollars while maintaining buyers and sellers trust on the platform. The team aspires to provide sellers with state-of-the-art tools for managing their inventory and orders and financial reporting.
With such significant growth, Seller Services is investing in technology platforms leveraging machine learning, natural language processing techniques and mobile solutions for solving critical business systems and process challenges.
TopE-Commerce Platform Group
The "Identity – Auth" team's mission is to handle all customer authentication and authorization, across a variety of channels, in a secure way, so that business can outsource this functionality to us, and focus on its core values. We own hosted, standalone applications as well as platform services. We serve both internal clients inside the Amazon firewall, and external clients outside the firewall. External clients include subsidiaries as well as third parties. Some of the big projects we work on are architectural improvements around access control architecture, better mechanisms around access protection, improving the scalability and reducing the cost of existing distributed systems, supporting devices and native applications, strengthening the cryptography currently used and providing flexible mechanisms for subsidiaries to access Amazon assets et al. Working in this team will involve understanding concepts such as hashing, encryption, standards such as OpenId PAPE and OAuth, making architectural choices which will shape the future of highly scalable, available, innovative robust and business-critical services and building them using Object Oriented languages on Unix flavored platforms.
CDS team handles the management of customer’s personal profile data that defines their identity, from address books to social networks(Facebook, Twitter). Typical customer profile data is comprised of the customer attributes such as customer name, email address, address book, date of birth, etc. CDS team also provides secure, generic event notification/message passing system along with providing Authentication, Authorization and Accounting for inter-service communication. Working in this team will involve understanding of highly scalable, available, innovative robust storage technologies and business-critical services using object oriented programming concepts on Linux platform.
Tax Engine Software team is building a global platform to make consistent, reliable, accurate calculations of transaction taxes (Sales/Use, VAT, etc.) for all goods and services provided by Amazon and its merchant partners. In addition to the challenges around scalability, availability and latency needs that several of the service owners at Amazon deal with, the complexity of the Tax domain poses unique set of challenges and opportunities. A truly global platform that is able to support tax calculations in different countries, each with its own nuances and special tax laws, is almost unheard of in the industry. The Tax Engine Software team works closely with a team of tax geeks that understand the tax laws and provide the engineering expertise for building the platform and technology solutions to comply with the laws. Based on strong distributed systems development principles and service-based architecture, we are building the platform for extensibility and flexibility, to support continued growth of our businesses and reducing the time to market. The goal of this design is to optimize data integrity, and ensure high availability of the system.
Working on Tax Engine platform involves pioneering new architectural and design choices, implementing new features, developing distributed services, and building a dynamically scalable solution using object-oriented Java on UNIX-flavored platforms. We are a fast-paced environment, using agile methodology and lightweight SOA design patterns. We have a team culture that encourages innovation, continuous learning and expect developers and management alike to take a high level of ownership for the product vision, technical architecture and project delivery.
Amazon has thousands of discrete applications running in a distributed environment and Amazon's eCommerce Platform Application (eCPA) team continues to push the limit of Service Oriented Architecture. eCommerce Platform Application is driving key innovations in this arena; it's our job to make sure that all these applications come together to form a platform upon which web developers can build e-Commerce websites. Our system powers the Shopping Cart, Gift Wrap / Messaging Service and Product Customization Service for Amazon, partners' sites, and Amazon Webstore.
We are building a new e-Commerce platform that will provide an unprecedented level of extensibility for our businesses and reduce time to market. Our long term goal is to extend our platform such that any developer, anywhere, who wants to build an e-Commerce site will use our system. We need sharp people to define the vision and build the systems that will power that growth.
Working on Amazon's eCommerce Platform Application involves pioneering new architectural and design choices, inventing new features, developing distributed services, and building a dynamically scalable (think: cloud computing) rock-solid platform solution using object-oriented C/C++ and Java on UNIX-flavored platforms. We are a fast-paced environment, using agile methodology and lightweight SOA design patterns. We have a team culture that encourages innovation and expect developers and management alike to take a high level of ownership for the product vision, technical architecture and project delivery.
Tiered Storage team is a part of the ecP Persistence Platforms group. The ecp Persistence Platform group focuses on building platforms which help other teams in Amazon handle data efficiently. It provides a platform to store data, handle high throughput and availability needs thus "sedimenting" persistence out of application development. It provides a service to host computation, configuration, and application metadata. It also provides a portable, self-typing markup to use in your key-blob stores and for transmission over the wire.
The Tiered Storage team is building an integrated, cost-effective, and scalable platform as a hosted service for all aspects of a business application development, including primary storage, caching, pre-computation, on-demand computation, events, and search. The platform offers guaranteed quality of service and has multiple tiers of storage and a uniform computation platform catering to various business use-cases with different SLAs.
eCOX team(we) specializes in managing highly available, large scale and distributed eCommerce platform services. We aspire to be experts in running business critical services. We started our journey as a Frontline support team (handling tickets) in 2007 and matured as operational excellence team by 2011. We own availability, manage software deployments and infrastructure for eCommerce Platform. We leverage our experience in running ~100 Tier-1 and business critical services to consistently improve efficiency in operations. We make software services run better in a production environment. We drive next generation initiatives such as making software release management human free and running software services on Cloud. We build tools and develop applications to eliminate human intervention in supporting software services.
The DW & BI team harnesses the power of the world's most sophisticated eCommerce Business Intelligence system! The team is responsible for providing information useful in data-driven decision-making, and provides business intelligence that is timely, accurate, and actionable. Amazon's Business Intelligence Team is responsible for the business analytics platform that includes one of the world's largest data warehouses. We develop the core platform technologies that drive all of Amazon's business decisions. The team provides reporting, analysis, data mining, and data integration to over 2000 internal and external customers worldwide. Our technology serves as a foundation for mining data from Amazon.com Business Intelligence databases and provides up to the minute information, to drive business critical decisions at all levels of Amazon.com. The team is responsible for bringing in new data content as well as managing data currently available in the Data Warehouse. This team works with project teams to analyze and gather source data that needs to be made available for company reporting. It also provides a reporting service to the business of Amazon.com, utilizing a reporting and analysis platform known as Amazon Analytics combined with the work of its data engineers, who are familiar with a multitude of various data sets and subject areas. The operations part has challenges to monitor over 36,000 jobs on a daily basis and to resolve most upstream data and ETL related problems for internal and external customers worldwide.
We believe, amazon needs DATA to provide great customer experience. We believe, if we build reliable and actionable datasets, our business teams can take timely business decisions and provide great customer experience to our end customers.
Vendor Payment Systems team builds systems that process Amazon vendor transactions worldwide. Healthy relationships with vendors impact selection on the Amazon website, and thus making it crucial for the company to process these transactions in an organized & automated fashion.. The team tracks all inventory movement within Amazon and validates invoices against payment terms present in the contractual agreements. This team is also responsible for company's financial results, as this team owns the inventory liabilities reporting. Engineers use Java & C++ to build robust systems that interact with third party financial systems.
Team also works on building generic web services for the consumption of other development teams in Amazon, in order to facilitate payments to external vendors and in some cases individual customers (Example being a Mobile App Developer a Digital Self Publisher/Author). The vendor central team builds & maintains the interface that allows vendors to perform self-service tasks online (e.g. payment releases). Team also builds Ruby on Rails based internal portal to support all of internal business users. This internal portal is a one stop place for thousands of business users and supports powerful control operations in dealing with payments.
The team uses AWS based technologies like Simple Workflow Service for managing the relationship/workflow between external vendors & internal customers and Simple Queue Service for all of the asynchronous processing that is needed. Team also focuses on Operational Excellence in order to mitigate transactional issues when dealing with large volumes of disbursements. The data metrics and machine learning team analyses huge volumes of data in order to track patterns & trends and drive continuous process improvements that result in additional free cash flow generation to the company.
TopCustomer Support Team
Amazon’s Hyderabad Customer Service Centre started operations in August 2005 and has grown steadily in size and scope ever since. HYD CS provides 24/7 world-class customer service support to North America and UK customers through email and chat. At CS our aim is to offer an effortless, rapid and competent experience to our customers who reach out to us for assistance. We operate in a fast paced, rapidly growing environment offering new challenges and opportunities for making impactful changes in the Amazon ecosystem. Our relentless focus on process improvement has helped us continuously evolve and expand our focus into new business domains. As the Customer Service team continues to grow and evolve, we are seeking people who are customer centric, process oriented and enjoy the challenges associated with rapid growth. The ultimate aim of course is to enable the company to achieve its mission of becoming the ‘Earth’s Most Customer Centric Company’, by putting the customers first!”
TopGlobal Finance Operations (GFO)
Amazon.com has extensive vendor payment operations activities for our vendors across the Globe. The India operation at Hyderabad commenced in 2005 and has grown steadily in its size and scope into a dynamic and large team. Apart from handing basic transaction processing, critical research and moderately complex analytical activities the team includes Accounts Receivables and WW payroll processes in its portfolio. Our continued focus is to strengthen our worldwide engine that enables the activities of Amazon.com in areas of Inventory and Non-Inventory Invoice Processing and Vendor Payment Cycle activities.
The Global Finance Operations team has recently expanded its accounting team into Bangalore India, to support several accounting processes within Finance Operations including accounts payable, vendor accounts receivable, and payroll.
TopWarehouse Deals
Warehouse Deals offers Amazon customers the choice of buying open boxed and refurbished items at discounted prices. Amazon.com deals with huge quantity of sales every day and hence it generates a volume of customer returns and warehouse damages of its products. These products are often in perfect condition but due to minor packing or box damages, they are not sellable on Amazon.com. Warehouse Deals acts as an Amazon merchant to sell these items as an independent seller and recover value on opened or returned merchandise. In order to achieve this, the Warehouse Deals team builds tools for evaluating the quality of these items, routing the items, and finally pricing these items and lists in www.warehousedeals.com for sale. Warehouse Deals does almost everything done for Amazon retail business but at smaller scale from selection, pricing & re-pricing algorithms, automates disposal process of unsold items.
Typical technical problems include building software services, algorithms & systems that support high volume transactions, rapid scaling, and implementing complex optimization algorithms in an ever changing environment. It employs agile software development strategies with short development cycles. This also means that engineers get to see the impact of their changes immediately by using cool technologies like J2EE, Ruby on Rails, AWS, S3 etc., to build robust systems that interact with other Amazon Systems.
The Amazon Trade-In program enables our customers to receive an Amazon Gift Card in exchange for their used items. We offer free shipping, free returns and automatic gift card deposits which make it a convenient program to use. Software development teams own and develop software like Website, Item selection, Bidding Engines, Pricing algorithms, evaluation software, Integration with Carrier / Courier companies. Working on Trade-in platform application involves pioneering new architectural and design choices, inventing new features, developing distributed services, and building a dynamically scalable solutions using object-oriented C/C++ and Java on UNIX-flavored platforms. We are a fast-paced environment, using agile methodology and lightweight SOA design patterns & Workflows. We have a team culture that encourages innovation and expect developers and management alike to take a high level of ownership for the product vision, technical architecture and project delivery.
Top