I had an opportunity to speak at Cyberworkplace.tech. It was truly inspiring to talk to a new generation of IT professionals, listen to their questions and insights.

Roman Gorge's Blog
Technology, leadership and self-education
I had an opportunity to speak at Cyberworkplace.tech. It was truly inspiring to talk to a new generation of IT professionals, listen to their questions and insights.
With this post I want to celebrate a personal achievement and important milestone in my career. After passing extensive training program, I have become Amazon Bar Raiser!
Since the day I had my interview at Amazon back in January 2020, I was amazed by Amazon hiring process and when I started interviewing myself and learnt more about how to Make Great Hiring Decisions and the role of Bar Raiser, I knew that I want to become a BR myself.
So, now I will do my best to keep raising the bar, support my peers in different Amazon organizations and continue do what I enjoy – meet diverse candidates, learn about them and help Hiring Managers.
The formal definition of Amazon Bar Raiser goes as following:
A Bar Raiser is an interviewer at Amazon who is brought into the hiring process to be an objective third party. By bringing in somebody who’s not associated with the team, the best long-term hiring decisions are made and we can ensure that the company is always serving, surprising, and innovating for customers. The role of the Bar Raiser is to be a steward of Amazon’s 16 Leadership Principles.
https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/working-at-amazon/what-is-a-bar-raiser-at-amazon
I want to share some of insights that I got during my Bar Raiser In Training program.
Check out my other post Amazon interviews “Yes, but…” insights
Recently, I have crossed the mark of 150 completed interviews at Amazon. Taking my tenure into the account, I have interviewed one candidate every 4 days. It may look like a high number, but I am still learning what does it mean to be a “professional interviewer”. I am passionate about the subject, so I want to share some of the insights. So, this will be a first post of its kind.
What is common among the candidates who received an offer from Amazon? They took time to prepare for the interview, but there are some nuances you should be aware of:
If you are interested in the role of Technical Account Manager, check out my other post.
At September 2020 I have joined AWS as Senior Technical Account Manager in Nordics region. Our team is growing with amazing pace and we are hiring in all Nordics countries. One year later, already in a new role, I am writing this post to share insights about what Technical Account Manager (TAM) role is.
FAQ below will help candidates to understand better TAM role, Enterprise Support organization and Amazon culture. Feel free to post comments with your questions or reach out to me via Linkedin
Q: What Technical Account Manager role is at AWS?
A: A Technical Account Manager (TAM) is customer’s designated technical point of contact who helps customers onboard, provides advocacy and guidance to help plan and build solutions using best practices, coordinates access to subject matter experts, assists with case management, presents insights and recommendations on your AWS spend, workload optimization, and event management, and proactively keeps customers’ AWS environment healthy.
Continue readingMigration to Cloud impacts whole enterprise organization from engineering to marketing. Procurement and financial teams are not an exclusion as well. In fact, these teams need to adopt completely new mental model – shift from CAPEX to OPEX, shortened procurement cycles and high pace of change.
The new way of working between Financial and Engineering parts of organization in Cloud is FinOps or Cloud Financial Management. I am going to write a detailed article about FinOps implementation in large enterprises at some point in time. But even if organization does not plan to implement FinOps practices, they still need to teach procurement and finance how to operate in the new reality.
Disclaimer: This post is on my own and doesn’t necessarily represent Amazon Web Services’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
The challenge is that last 10-15 years of technological innovation did not change procurement process much in large enterprises. So, the gap is significant. In my experience, organizations tend to forget about it or do not realize that it exists. As a result, engineering organization may already adopt Cloud, while for finance team it is still an unknown land and their processes are not aligned with Cloud Economics.
I came up with a list of AWS Whitepapers and other resources that can be used as “Introduction to Cloud Economics for Procurement”.
Cloud Financial Management is a huge topic at AWS but 5 resources above is an absolute minimum that your procurement team should read and understand.
Check out my other post about AWS Whitepapers.
This post is a first of its kind. It is a summary of my recent thoughts about AWS Cloud as a system and how to manage it. More insights will follow.
Disclaimer: This post is on my own and doesn’t necessarily represent Amazon Web Services’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
Let’s imagine you are an employee of a medium or large size enterprise. Let’s imagine the enterprise is investing in Cloud services. Some teams are moving their workloads to Cloud, some are not doing it yet, but senior management is convinced that company’s IT future will be going hand in hand with Cloud technologies.
A number of accounts is growing and management made a decision to establish centralized Cloud governance and create… Let’s call it Cloud Infrastructure Management team. And you are member of this team. Your task is to create a scalable and robust mechanisms to perform administrative and management tasks of your Cloud infrastructure.
So, where do you start?
The list of AWS Whitepapers and Guides below will help you to build a foundation of theoretical knowledge and practical advices. It is far from complete and covers only tiny percentage of publicly available AWS documentation.
Education is a never ending process and much more excellent AWS Whitepapers and Guides are available for you.
What is your list of best materials about Cloud? Share your thoughts and suggestions in comments section!
I was a Compute and Networking guy for a while, so it is good to add breadth into my technical knowledge.