It’s official (or it will be as soon as FedEx does its thing): I’m going to work for Amazon.com. I shall be working with Werner Vogels, the Amazon CTO. My start date is August 14; I’ll be heading off to Seattle on August 8. Lots to do between now and then.
I’m very excited by this job, and just a little bit intimidated too. For years I’ve been involved in projects at Sun which focussed on “distributed computing at large scale”. Those of you who heard Rob Gingell or Greg Papadopoulos (or me) speaking on the subject will know that we were convinced that the reality of “large scale” would continue to surprise people. (Shades of Hofstadter’s Law, or Douglas Adams on space.) Well, now I get to deal with “really, really large scale” – unmediated, no excuses, in the flesh. It’s challenging. It’s… well, exhilarating. And it’s a wonderful opportunity.
More anon. Right now, I’m going to crack open a bottle of champagne!
–
P.S. Many thanks to all of you who helped with this, especially Dan, Cassandra, Wendy, and Rakhel.
Entries (RSS)
This is great news! Congratulations on the new gig. ….. I hope you won’t have to relocate to Seattle permanently.
Congratulations Geoff!
Was it the employee discount on books that attracted you?
Does this mean a transcontinental shift?
DaveR
Hi Geoff,
Congratulations and welcome to the neighbourhood! Maybe now you will make it sometime to beautiful Victoria, BC.
Greetings,
Werner
Score! Well done. I’m sure that it will be fun amongst all the challenges…
Cheers, Julian
congratulations geoff! are you going to be relocating to seattle?
while we don’t have champagne wendy and i will toast some caipirinhas to your new job!
Congratulations!
A New Family Member
Today was a good news day: Geoff Arnold has decided to join the Amazon engineering family. As Geoff mentions in the announcement on his weblog Amazon is all about scale. In recent presentations I have been demonstrating how Amazon Engineers are scal…
Congratulations! After years of working at a place where “The Network is the Computer”, perhaps that reality is, in truth, being fully realized at places like Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, and Google. I believe you should consider this an awkwardly executed promotion. [grin] Best wishes in your new position.
– Scott
Welcome to Seattle! Hopefully we’ll get together for a pint now and then, and please do feel free to hit me up for any Seattle-specific questions.
Wow. Sun’s loss is Amazon’s gain. Definitely congratulations. Hope you like rain.
Geoff Arnold goes to Amazon
Last year they hired Pat Helland from Microsoft, now Werner Vogels and Amazon have got a new team member and are clearly building a team of pretty bright people to work on the next step of distributed computing : dealing with SCALE. It is interesting …
[...] Last year they hired Pat Helland from Microsoft, now Werner Vogels and Amazon have got a new team member and are clearly building a team of pretty bright people to work on the next step of distributed computing : dealing with SCALE. It is interesting to see that Geoff Arnold is now making the trip from Sun to Amazon to work with Werner and the team. [...]
excellent news! should be alot of fun.
i opted to move to a really small startup in sf. started this week. change is good.
best,
- james
Hello Geoff,
.
Congratulations on your new job
Very cool – congratulations!
If Sun is a Lightbulb, what does that make Amazon?!!
Great news – well done!!
Congratulations Geoff. Nice to see you gainfully employed again.
You’ve got me curious what the Amazon employee discount is…
Congratulations!
damn Congratulations!!!! I’m not sure how I missed this post completely.. but very very cool!
Sounds like an exciting gig. I’ll do my best to order more books from Amazon.
bill
Man, turn your back for a week or two, and look what happens! Congratulations indeed!
I don’t need to order more books from Amazon. I think there’s already a dedicated pipeline to my doorstep. My son has one too.
Enjoy!
-Mike-