I am a Software Development Engineer at Amazon’s Development Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland. Originally from Lithuania, I have lived, studied and worked in four different countries. I graduated from Edinburgh University in 2015 and was awarded a first class honours undergraduate Master’s degree in Informatics a year early, and completed an internship at Amazon during the summer before my final year at university. After I graduated, I joined the company on a full-time basis as a Software Development Engineer.
For the last three years I have been working in a team that creates factual relationships between products in the Amazon Catalog using machine learning. The relationships that we create ensure a smoother product search and discovery for customers. For example, I contributed towards developing relationships between books and authors to power Author Pages amongst other features of the website. Recently, I have been designing workflow capabilities for teams that have business goals around the relationships we create. We want to ensure the input received via the workflows is used both to fix the customer experience and as training data for our machine learning models.
I am an active member of the Amazon Women in Engineering affinity group and I am passionate about supporting women in technology. A colleague and I developed and pitched the ‘Amazon Early Insights’ programme, which enables young women from all backgrounds to build their confidence in the technology industry. For the last two years we invited first-year and second-year female university students from across the EU to spend a week at the Amazon Development Centre to develop an Alexa skill. The programme has been a great success with potential to expand to other locations. Two participants from the 2017 programme applied, interviewed for and completed internships at the centre this summer. I also volunteer with the students, find them mentors and arrange talks and networking options.
I have a relentless enthusiasm for exploring new ideas and meeting people in the tech community. I often attend talks, career fairs and diversity conferences on behalf of Amazon. Recently, I gave a talk at a Scotland Women in Technology “The World of Data” event.
