Farewell to Amazon, Hello Tableau

After eight amazing years, I’ve decided to leave Amazon.com and take a Senior Software Engineer position at Tableau Software.

Tableau is a roughly 1500-employee company based in Fremont, about two miles north of Amazon’s South Lake Union campus. For the past 10 years they’ve been building software and services to visualize and analyze data. I first noticed Tableau’s interactive web visualizations on Seattle Bubble, a housing news blog, which devotes an entire category to them. I’m impressed by Tableau charts’ fun, interactive designs and useful features, and I expect to work on projects that improve what customers can do with them.

I leave Amazon having worked with extraordinary people on big, important projects for over 8 years. After nearly 4 years growing Amazon’s huge Email Platform — which has since been opened to the world as Simple Email Service — I joined a team of 6 developers working on Kindle Content Store, which had just split from a larger team that also sold Kindle devices. Since April 2010 Kindle Book Store, as it’s now known, has grown to employ over 100 developers who build stores for 13 marketplaces (including such newcomers as Australia and Mexico) to serve customers on PCs, mobile phones (including Amazon’s own Fire Phone), three lines of first-party devices, and a host of third-party apps. When I joined, only the basic non-touch E Ink Kindles were sold in the U.S. and neither Kindle Touch nor Kindle Fire were available.

Like Amazon, Tableau has gone through growing pains as it has added employees rapidly. I haven’t even set foot in Tableau’s new offices in a former gym yet, but by the time I join next month, my team will have moved in.

I am very grateful for the experiences I’ve had at Amazon. From my first frenetic migration project off of the dying Obidos platform to the just-launched Kindle Unlimited, Amazon is a company that has encouraged me to get out of my comfort zone and that has demanded my very best effort. It’s been a challenging, hard-working eight years and I wish all my colleagues success as they think big about the future.