Duong Nguyen

As a principal engineer, I applied my architectural expertise to tackle cross-cutting issues across the systems within my organization. By identifying opportunities to simplify the overall technology landscape, I worked on initiatives to reduce time-to-market as well as operational costs. This strategic effort to streamline the underlying architecture would enable my teams to deliver new capabilities to customers more efficiently, while also improving the long-term maintainability and scalability of our solutions.

As of 01-2025, I transitioned to a new organization to help build Agentic AI based work automation systems for Amazon builders.

I continued to lead my team, now known as Amazon Alerting, and helped grow our business beyond just serving internal Amazon needs.

In partnership with my manager, I wrote a proposal and obtained support to build and launch AWS Incident Manager Contacts - a public AWS service that allows customers to prepare on-call rotations and be engaged during incidents, similar to the systems I had developed for Amazon's internal use. I successfully launched the AWS Incident Manager Contacts service in May 2021. Today, this offering is available in 16 different AWS regions, demonstrating its widespread adoption and value to AWS customers.

In addition to driving the growth of my immediate team and product, I continued expanding my influence as a technical leader, positively impacting other teams within my organization as well as the teams I partner with across AWS. Acknowledging my increasingly strategic impact and contributions, AWS promoted me to the role of Principal Engineer by March 2024.

I joined the AWS Corporate Infrastructure team as a Lead Software Development Engineer. In this role, I owned various mission-critical services that help Amazon employees plan their on-call rotations and engage the on-call personnel during incidents. These services were engineered for the highest levels of availability, designed to remain fully functional even in the face of large-scale failure events impacting other AWS services. Serving tens of thousands of teams across Amazon, we send millions of critical engagement notifications every month to ensure all incidents are responded to in a timely manner.

As the technical lead, I was responsible for the overall service architecture. In this capacity, I spearheaded the effort to rebuild the service from a monolithic legacy system into a modern cellular, multi-tenant, multi-region design, achieving a 99.999% availability target. During my tenure with the team, I also played a key role in developing the skills of more junior engineers, serving as a mentor and technical evangelist.

In recognition of my achievements in architecting and delivering these high-impact, highly reliable systems, I was promoted to the role of Senior Software Development Engineer in 2018.

I transitioned to Amazon, where I joined the Ebooks and Digital organization, specifically working on the Pre-Transaction team. My first project in this role was to enable Amazon Kindle customers to purchase ebook series as bundles and apply promotional incentives. Building on this initial success, I subsequently collaborated with other partner teams to further extend the promotional capabilities, allowing Amazon's partners to also drive these offerings.

The key challenge I had to overcome in these initiatives was aligning the various services and teams involved in the ebook publishing and post-transaction processes. Demonstrating strong cross-functional coordination and technical problem-solving skills, I was able to deliver solutions that seamlessly integrated these disparate components.

Later on, I took the initiative to build a service addressing a cross-cutting concern across Amazon's ebook and digital divisions. This service provided a unified way for teams to calculate contribution profit, driving greater transparency and consistency across the organization.

I was a member of the front-end team at EPiServer (now Optimizely), whose mission was to reimagine the user experience across their product suite entirely. My first major achievement in this role was developing a code-first, dynamic UI for defining personalization criteria within the EPiServer CMS 6.0 product. Building on the expertise and insights gained from this project, I then went on to work on a new framework for generating UI directly from server-side code. This innovative framework powered the Edit mode functionality in EPiServer CMS 7.0, as well as similar experiences across other EPiServer offerings, such as EPiServer Commerce.

While attending the master's program in software engineering at the University of Gothenburg, I met the founder of Blue Mobile Systems (now Guard Tools) during a course project demo. The innovative technology showcased in the demo impressed the company, and I was subsequently offered the opportunity to help them build a new web portal for their customers. Working 15 hours per week, I built the Guard Tools Web platform (http://www.guardtools.com/product/#web) from the ground up over the course of 6 months.

The GuardTools Web product has become a crucial component of the GuardTools comprehensive security management solution, which is the most successful offering of its kind in Northern Europe. To this day, Guard Tools Web has successfully served dozens of security companies and hundreds of thousands of end customers.

I joined Novellus as a Senior Software Engineer, where I was tasked with leading the critical project to modernize the core software that power the company's semiconductor fabrication platforms. This involved transitioning the codebase from C++ 6.0 to the newer C++ .NET framework which I adeptly carried out to completion.

However, after a relatively short time at Novellus, I made the decision to leave the company in order to pursue higher education. Beginning in September 2028, I enrolled at University of Gothenburg in Sweden, with the desire to expand my knowledge and skill set even further.

Inspired by successful global tech companies like Google, Yahoo!, and eBay, I teamed up with some friends to start our own company. Our goal was to build a range of internet services - things like e-commerce, search, and social communities in Vietnam. As the CTO, I developed the overall technology plan and led the development process. In less than a year, we launched a website where businesses could list deals to boost their sales. On that website, we attracted hundreds of businesses and tens of thousands of daily customers.

Unfortunately, the company was unable to secure the necessary venture capital funding from investors, so we were ultimately forced to make the difficult decision to shut down the service due to financial pressures. While the startup didn't succeed, I gained important experience in product development, team leadership, and handling the challenges of an early-stage tech company.

As a recent graduate, I was tasked with a challenging project to develop the production capacity planning software for MAP, the largest auto-part manufacturer in Vietnam, a subsidiary of Honda Motor Corporation. My primary responsibility was to design and implement an optimization algorithm within the planning module. The goal was to maximize production throughput while minimizing overhead costs. I successfully delivered this module, which allowed the customers to generate monthly production plans accounting for hundreds of variables. Through iterative refinements, I was able to simplify the algorithm and dramatically improve its performance, reducing the runtime from hours to under a minute.

During my tenure at iSphere Software, I also played a key role in streamlining the company's software installation and upgrade processes. Leveraging my network engineering expertise, I established a secure VPN-based connection between the company's infrastructure and customer sites. This enabled efficient remote training as well as seamless over-the-air software updates, greatly enhancing the customer experience.