I joined Amazon in 2009, when we were a 3000-engineer company, and got to experience its fast growth from 3k to 90k engineers over a 15-yr period. During that time, our engineering productivity needs had a number of interesting inflection points. A little toil here and there was a minor annoyance when we were 3k engineers but it became a much larger bottleneck when we were 10k, and things that didn’t matter with 10k engineers mattered greatly with 90k engineers. We had to continuously evolve the way we thought about our development practices as the company grew.
Having worked at Google as well exposed me to how some fundamentally different architectural decisions these companies made shaped the way they test and release software in significantly distinct ways. For example, Google chose to maintain a single shared monorepo where more than a hundred thousand engineers work with no branches, whereas Amazon chose an architecture with tens of thousands of independent microrepos. Both systems work at scale but require very different investments in engineering productivity, such as how test environments fit in the picture, and what kind of testing happens before and after submit.
Join me and learn about my journey as I saw Amazon grow by 30x!
Speaker
![](https://qconsf.com/sites/qcon_sf/files/styles/medium/public/pictures/2024-07/carlosa.jpeg?itok=tbjKdMHr)
Carlos Arguelles
Senior Principal Engineer @Amazon, 27 Years Experience in Developer Productivity Engineering, Previously @Google and @Microsoft
Carlos Arguelles is a Senior Principal Engineer at Amazon. He has 27 years of experience working in various aspects of Developer Productivity Engineering at Amazon, Google and Microsoft. He was a Technical Lead for company-wide Infrastructure for Integration Testing at Amazon for 6 years and held the same position at Google for 4 years.
Carlos is passionate about Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery and Core Developer Infrastructure for mid-to-large software companies. Spending nearly three decades at three of the largest software companies in the world, he has seen first-hand how hundreds of thousands of developers write code, review code, test code and deploy code at large scale. At these large companies, little inefficiencies can aggregate to developer fatigue and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of productivity lost or wasted hardware resources. Carlos obsesses about how to make engineers' lives better, remove toil, improve efficiency, and raise the bar in engineering and operational excellence.
Carlos writes stories about his life at Amazon, Google and Microsoft in his blog. You can follow him at Linkedin.