About

My name is James Hood. I graduated from the University of Arizona with a BS in Computer Engineering and minors in Computer Science and Math. I worked as a software developer for IBM, working on enterprise disk storage servers for the first 6 years of my career. In 2009, I was hired at Amazon and am now a Principal Software Engineer. I’ve worked on a variety of teams, mostly in AWS (AWS Mechanical Turk, AWS Serverless, AWS CloudFormation) but with a 5-year stint in Retail fulfillment software in the middle.

Areas I’m passionate about:

1. AI-native transformation: My current focus is on integrating AI into internal builder tools as part of the Amazon software builder experience organization. I’m passionate about accelerating productivity through the combination of cultural transformation and intelligent tooling.
2. Service architecture, especially serverless, event-driven microservice architecture. I’ve written internal frameworks to simplify writing event-driven services at Amazon.
3. Creating sustainable, high-performance teams at Amazon with healthy work/life balance.
4. Mentoring and growing others through knowledge sharing. I blog frequently both internally and externally.

Working in Amazon’s culture of highly autonomous 2-pizza teams, I have gained a lot of experience helping to form strong team cultures and avoid common pitfalls in software development. I maintain a blog on Amazon’s internal network and have given several talks that I can’t share publicly. However a lot of the content of my blogs and talks are not Amazon-specific, so I’m maintaining this external blog to share my thoughts with the wider community.

In my free time I enjoy reading, being outdoors with my wife and two daughters, running, and playing/watching ice hockey.

All opinions expressed on this website are my own and do not represent the opinions of Amazon, its partners or subsidiaries.