Career Choice

During my first year at Amazon, I worked on an internal product that allowed employees to pursue their career goals by applying for scholarships at academic institutions of their choice. For eligible employees, Amazon would pay up to 95% of tuition and fees (up to a yearly maximum) towards a certificate or diploma in qualified fields of study, leading to in-demand jobs.

In June 2022, Amazon proudly announced that over 25,000 employees had joined the program in the six months prior.

The application I developed is built on Salesforce using HTML5, JavaScript, and Sass. Working with the proprietary Apex programming language and Visualforce framework, I built dynamic experiences for every unique user from 14 countries and in 9 languages. Due to the global nature of the product, I learned the value of localization and accessibility at scale.

Accomplishments

I refactored the front-end and middle tier of the existing "Apply for Tuition" process. This was the largest effort where I spent most of my time while on the team.

• Problem: The UX design team decided that this application process needed to be re-branded and enhanced to allow for new business requirements to be met.
• Solution: I made global changes to the Career Choice application process and implemented the new front-end branding and user experience. These changes were launched in December 2020.

I automated a process for adding language translation content.

• Problem: Our team had a process for copying language translations from Excel spreadsheets and entering it into Salesforce so that users from any country would be able to read it. I identified this as an extremely repetitive manual process that would require many hours and wouldn't scale well due to how many translations needed to be entered.
• Solution: I automated the process by leveraging the Salesforce Metadata API and greatly reduced the time needed to create language translations. Using Python, I wrote code that would automatically convert the Excel content into XML files to be deployed via the API. Then, I created a screen recording to document the process and share it with my teammates.

I patched a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability.

• Problem: The Amazon information security team had raised a minor XSS risk.
• Solution: I was able to pinpoint the cause and prevent it going forward by sanitizing inputs across the site.

I created a new file upload component.

• Problem: Large files were not able to be uploaded by users.
• Solution: By using a JavaScript technique called "chunking" to recursively split large files into smaller pieces, I was able to solve the issue and send them to the server more efficiently. For this particular issue, our team weighed a couple options but ended up committing to the "chunking" approach because we only accepted 4MB files of type PDF, PNG, or JPG.