Meet Sofia, Spare Parts Program Manager
“We need people from every background to bring ideas and solutions.”
Central Reliability Maintenance Engineering (RME) uses science and data to drive scalable maintenance best practices across Amazon business units globally. We do this to meet our customer promise, reduce costs, and support the Climate Pledge.
Central RME has hubs in the US, Europe, and India, and you can also find roles in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, and Australia. We have a wide range of roles, from senior planner to software development engineer, operations engineer, scientist, learning specialist, and more.
Asset Science and Technology is comprised of four teams: Asset Performance Management (APM), Global Planning, Decision Science and Technology (DST), and Amazon Maintenance Operations Center (AMOC).
Global Planning leads the technical development of and oversees the use and management of the computerized maintenance management system known as APM. This system reduces maintenance cost, increases asset life, improves productivity, reduces downtime, lowers total cost of ownership, tracks spare parts inventory, and provides critical asset data.
The DST team uses machine learning to develop predictive models for spare parts, cycle-based maintenance, predictive maintenance, energy consumption, and refrigeration health status monitoring programs. This team leads the spare parts program to optimize levels throughout the network.
AMOC provides proactive and reactive maintenance services, manages preventive maintenance activities, and supports procurement-related tasks.
This team ensures all new assets are designed for maintainability, correctly installed, and properly commissioned before RME takes ownership. The team works with upstream partners to make changes for maintainability at the design stage and ensure equipment enters RME ownership with spares, training, FMEAs, and service agreements in place. It verifies the standard of installation and commissioning through the qualification processes.
This team provides standards and support across Associate Facing Services (e.g. janitorial, pest control) and Building Services (base building maintenance and compliance).
Reliability and Automation Engineering uses data from our operational technology tools to build long-term initiatives to increase the reliability and availability of material handling equipment, robotics, and other technologies.
The team builds problem-solving skills, captures and scales ideas from the network, and applies reliability-centered-maintenance techniques and failure mode and effect analysis to address common failures. They lead the move to predictive maintenance and condition-based monitoring, deploying handheld tools and wireless devices at scale.
The automation engineering part of the team contains the core control-related knowledge for the different MHE technologies. They develop and share best practices, including global control specifications, disaster recovery plans, and safety controls.
This team ensures machine-generated data results in an automated, appropriate, and effective proactive, corrective, or predictive maintenance action. They created the software for overall equipment effectiveness and in-house developed SCADA, which they continue to improve and deploy. Maintenance Automation Platform leads reporting and data surfacing to support the other central teams.
The Sustainability and Energy team leads projects to reduce energy and water usage, minimize waste, and improve the reliability, resilience, and maintenance of energy assets, including electrical infrastructure and photovoltaic arrays. They’re also responsible for the RME aspects of the building management system and HVAC units. This includes improving indoor air quality, optimizing equipment scheduling and performance, and making setpoint adjustments to ensure efficiency.
This team provides support for all technical training from onboarding to career development, with a focus on scalable digital learning. They also manage the third-party maintenance contracts in North America, as well as strategic workforce development.
The Project Management Office provides a centralized structure for end-to-end project management for RME, upstream stakeholders, and vendors who require RME resources. The team also owns the collection and deployment of best practices and permanent corrective actions.
“We need people from every background to bring ideas and solutions.”
“It’s the right moment for someone who wants to develop and grow.”
I joined Amazon in 2017 as an automation engineer to help manage the launch of the first site in Italy to incorporate Amazon Robotics technology. In 2018, I was promoted to senior automation engineer and began leading key projects and growing and developing a team of automation engineers.
I was born in Iran and did my undergraduate and master’s degrees in electrical engineering there. I started my career as a maintenance engineer and then joined an electric utility company as an electrical design engineer. After moving to the US in 2011, I started a doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering, graduating with a thesis focused on developing controllers for doubly-fed induction generators used in wind farms.
I started my engineering career on the sunny island of Barbados at Mount Gay Rum Distilleries Limited—the birthplace of rum.. I honed my skills working across the three facilities (distillery, production site, and storage warehouse) before moving to Amazon in 2017.