1. How would you describe yourself in 2-4 sentences?
2. When did you join Amazon, what’s your position, and how would you describe your role?
I joined Amazon in October 2016, starting my experience with an internship in what is still my current team. Being a Solution Architect for the Amazon Pay team, my role is to work with merchants and partners to support them with the integration of our product with their platform, but also work with internal teams on product development.
3. When did you join Amazon, what’s your position and how would you describe your role?
See above :)
4. Have you worked at prior teams at Amazon?
No
5. What does a typical day look like for you?
It might sound like a clichè but there is no typical day in the Solution Architect job, which is also what makes it more exciting. The schedule is most of the time dictated by customer needs. One day can be focused on customer calls scheduled to help merchants and partners move on with an ongoing project, testing a new feature or a completed integration, attending face-to-face meetings with customers or events with partners, reviewing the technical design of a new feature. Juggling between all things happening on the different internal and external facing projects is the best part of the day to day job for sure.
6. What do you enjoy about the Amazon culture? Or what’s one thing you’ve learned since your time at Amazon?
One of the things that I enjoyed since Day 1 is how open the communication is across the organization. Meaning that, even if seniority of course matters and is respected, everyone has the possibility to communicate their ideas and raise concerns openly at any time. Joining Amazon as the first company I ever worked for, I definitely did not expect such an environment and it is something that sometimes still surprises me today, after more than 3 years.
7. What is your favourite leadership principle and why?
Earn Trust. I’m in a role that exposes me to projects that can have many stakeholders, both internal and external ones. It’s always key in those projects to find a way to keep everyone involved and aligned, to push things forward in the right direction. Earning trust of colleagues and customers is the most important thing to make things work. We work in very specialized functions in our organization, and it is inevitable that we need to depend on others to achieve our goals. Having a good team spirit, earn trust of your peers and managers, but also put your trust in others is the only way to succeed in my opinion.
8. What is one of the reasons you enjoy working at Amazon Pay?
If I have to pick one, it would definitely be the people I work with everyday. I think we have a quite unique team spirit in our business unit. People get along pretty well, everyone is nice and we have fun being around each other, which makes coming to work everyday much easier and better. We also like to party a lot in the EU team, which helps building the team spirit for sure.
9. How does Amazon support your career goals?
I always think that I was very lucky arriving in my time at the time I did. When I joined, my team was less than half the size it is today, so even if I was still in a “junior” role, I was exposed to bigger and more relevant projects more quickly. This of course helped me grow a lot under many points of view, improving my knowledge of the company and the payment industry, but also in the way I approach work and personal relationships in general. Such a dynamic environment really gives a lot of opportunities tho who is up to take on a challenge, and being always up for any new upcoming challenge worked quite well for me so far.
10. What are some of your passions outside of work? What are you most excited about outside of work?
I’m a huge basketball fan. Basketball has always been my biggest passion since I was a kid, and I still play regularly and follow the game as much as possible. I also follow any kind of other sport, especially team ones, and got more and more into American Football this year (Go Seahawks!). Being Italian, love for food is in my genes I guess, so I like to always try new places and new dishes. Also being a computer engineer I cannot hide my NERD side, I love videogames too.
11. What’s your super power or a something about you most people at work may not be aware of (secret talent, hobby, aspiration, etc.)?
Connecting to the love for food I mentioned above, I started trying to my cooking skills as well in the last few months. One of the things that I enjoy most is cooking for my friends and have dinner all together. A “rule” that I have for myself in those dinners is that I always make a dish that I never tried to do before, to make the “challenge” a bit more spicy. So far no case of food poison reported. A friend started calling those dinners “Fed By Fede”, which could also be a good name for a restaurant in the future, who knows.
12. If you had a personal motto, what would it be?
I’m not sure if it is a motto, but one thing that I keep in mind and apply regularly is “if you’re doing something, do it 100%". I always try to put my best effort in all things I do, work related or not. The least I usually get from this approach is that at least if I can’t succeed I have no regrets.