Afreen Azad

About Afreen Azad

Engineering Leader with 13 years of experience at Amazon/AWS combining an 8-year SDE foundation with 5 years of leadership. Demonstrated success in scaling cross-functional engineering organizations, architecting multi-year strategic visions, and translating complex goals into executable, high-impact roadmaps.Key Expertise:* Strategic Vision & Planning: Skilled in defining foundational charters and multi-year product visions that align with the business goals and customer needs. Experienced in navigating complex operational planning cycles, managing resource allocations, and driving consensus across stakeholder groups.* Organizational Leadership: Proven ability to build and scale engineering teams through periods of rapid growth and organizational restructuring. Committed to high-performance cultures through systematic talent development, mentorship of junior and senior engineers, and proactive coaching and mentorship.* Operational Excellence & Scale: Specialized in leveraging the AWS ecosystem (API Gateway, Route53, Step Functions, SQS, DynamoDB, etc.) to build high-availability, distributed systems, solving for global scale, reducing system latencies and operational overhead for mission-critical services.Specialties: Software Engineering Leadership, Strategic Roadmapping, Stakeholder Management, Performance Coaching, Distributed Systems Architecture, Cloud Infrastructure (AWS), and Engineering Operational Excellence.

Experience

1. Software Engineering Manager

   Amazon Web Services (AWS)

   Mar 2021 — Present · Seattle, WA, US

   Built the AWS Support Product Management engineering organization from the ground up, scaling from 0 to 9 direct reports at peak, and currently leading a 16-engineer organization across two teams.• Own the charter, roadmap, product prioritization, and engineering execution for AWS Support product platforms, with end-to-end ownership of customer purchase, enrollment, entitlement, and lifecycle workflows.• Define and drive the multi-year technical and platform vision and strategy for AWS Support Product Management, expanding the space from console-based plan management to a broader platform for trials, promotions, retention, and contractual workflows.• Lead development and operational health for AWS Support Products’ global console and core services, maintaining 99.99% availability for revenue-impacting customer workflows and serving as an escalation lead for high-severity incidents.• Partner directly with Product, Design, and Legal on customer-facing purchase and enrollment experiences, including review of language and terms for high-cost support-plan decisions and phased delivery plans for new launches.• Build a high-performing team through coaching, candid feedback, and stretch opportunities, with 3 promotions to date and additional engineers progressing toward the next level.• Increased customer acquisition by 44% through phased delivery of the Support Trials experience, strengthening the conversion funnel for premium support offerings.• Championed the technical vision and incremental delivery of a scalable, automated Enterprise Support enrollment system using event-driven architecture, reducing customer onboarding time from over 14 days to minutes.

Education

• Columbia Engineering

  Master of Science, Computer Science

• Vellore Institute of Technology

  Bachelor of Technology, Computer Science and Enginering

Skills

• Java
• C++
• C
• Computer Science
• Software Engineering
• Algorithms
• Sql
• Git
• Eclipse
• Data Structures
• Programming
• Linux
• Software Development
• Python
• Perforce
• Perl