I'm transferring to the Data Privacy team at Amazon.com

March 8th, 2022

Next week, I'll be starting a new role within Amazon as a Frontend Developer for one of the teams at Amazon.com that owns the data privacy experience. If you've clicked a cookie consent banner before, then you've interacted with something this team has built.

A bit of context is that I've been with AWS Professional Services for almost two years. It's a consulting agency within AWS that specializes in short-term enterprise-scale projects that customers need help with. A couple of examples of some things that I've built here are an AI-driven medical document translation solution for PDFs with a human in the loop review process, a revamped e-commerce website focused on improving accessibility, and a financial management solution for automating showbacks and chargebacks from AWS invoices.

I've had a blast working with ProServe (the shorthand that we use internally for Professional Services) and it's a bittersweet feeling to move to a new challenge since I'll miss working with everyone I've grown so close to. But we're all one customer-obsessed team and I'm not going very far.

I'll be focusing on improving the privacy experience in my new role. I've always thought of cookie consent banners and privacy as "Ugh, get out of my face already... I'm trying to do something here!" and I'm really looking forward to making it less intrusive.

It's a huge technical challenge, since you have to consider scale - this banner receives millions of clicks a day; laws and regulations - it has to be very clear in what it's asking and why; and a great user experience. Designers usually want to keep things as simple as possible, and legal teams want to be more explicit, so there's a delicate balance to make sure the user has all of the information they need without being overwhelmed. Especially when they're trying to buy something in a hurry. There's also the challenge of keeping the privacy experience consistent across all of Amazon subsidiaries like Whole Foods, IMDb, and Twitch and being the source of truth for setting guidelines within Amazon on how to approach consent.

Data is on the rise more than ever now and I can't wait to dive straight in to the privacy space and become an expert on the subject and share more best practices that I learn here so other developers can improve their privacy experience too. SL