Patti joined Amazon as a Search Operations Engineer on Cyber Monday 2014, her new team's most intense day of the year.  Product Search is a key component of the Amazon store, and the Search Ops team is responsible for keeping this complex set of services running smoothly. "Watching the team function like a well-oiled machine while calmly dealing with record levels of traffic convinced me that I'd come to the right place. Everyone was professional, effective, and completely unflappable."

Patti enjoys working in Search Ops because there are always new challenges, so it's never boring.  "On any given day you might be creating a new service to make the team more effective, diving into data to find the root cause for a problem, figuring out how to safely migrate a service to a new facility, preparing for an event like Prime Day, helping a development team bring a new service online, or occasionally coordinating the entire team's response to a critical issue."  She enjoys working with colleagues around the world, including Seattle, Dublin, and Tokyo.

Before coming to Amazon Patti spent a couple of decades in a variety of startups.  She loves working on extremely large-scale services and finds the professionalism and maturity of Amazon culture refreshing.  "Startups need to prioritize rapid change and growth, and fixing structural problems has a lower priority than pushing out new features. Amazon places a high value on operational excellence, and we invest resources in fixing problems at the source. When you're serving a mind-boggling amount of traffic every day you can't afford to leave things broken."

When she's not working Patti travels extensively, plays poker, bikes, is learning to play bass guitar, experiments with molecular gastronomy, and attends lots of theatre.