Leaving Amazon
So, after just over 3 and a half years, I’m leaving Amazon.
It’s been great fun — I can honestly say, even with my code being used by hundreds of millions of users in SpamAssassin and elsewhere, I hadn’t really had to come to grips with the distributed systems problems that an Amazon-scale service involves.
During my time at Amazon, I’ve had the pleasure of building out a brand-new, groundbreaking innovative internal service, from scratch to its current status where it’s deployed in production datacenters worldwide. It’s a low-latency service, used to monitor Amazon’s internal networks using massive quantities of measurement data and machine learning algorithms. It’s really very nifty, and I’m quite proud of what we’ve achieved. I was lucky to work closely with some very smart people during this, too — Amazon has some top-notch engineers.
But time to move on! In a week’s time, I’ll be joining Swrve to work on the server-side architecture of their system. Swrve have a very interesting product, extending the A/B-testing model into gaming, and a great team; and it’ll be nice to get back into startup-land once again, for a welcome change. (It’s not all roses working for a big company. ;) I’m looking forward to it. Who knows, I may even start blogging here again…
Pity about losing those 12 phone tool icons though!

Pádraig Brady said,
January 21, 2013 @ 2:32 pm
Wow congrats!
JohnO said,
January 21, 2013 @ 11:25 pm
Didn’t take long for them to disappear Justin:
“Oops! We couldn’t find anyone with the login of jmason.”
adam said,
January 23, 2013 @ 12:38 pm
Congrats on the new job Justin. :)
Conor said,
January 26, 2013 @ 9:59 am
Best of luck!
Caelen King said,
January 28, 2013 @ 8:40 pm
I sure you do great things for Swrve. Say hello to Stephen, he owes me a pint…. Or maybe I owe him a pint … Not sure now … Tell him he owes me a pint and we’ll see how things work out from there.