Meet a few of our Amazonians and explore our various business teams below.

Amazon Devices and Services

Amazon introduced the first Kindle in 2007 — at that time, it offered 90,000 eBooks and sold out 5.5 hours after the announcement. Since then, we have expanded to become the best-selling e-reader family in the world. We have gone beyond Kindle with our powerhouse Fire tablets, built for work and play with our Fire operating system. For streaming media lovers, we have created Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, and Fire TV Edition with voice search. Fire TV devices come with access to 500,000 movies, TV shows, and tens of thousands of channels, apps, and Alexa skills. Most recently, we introduced Amazon Echo and Alexa, the voice service that powers Echo and other devices so customers can play music, control their smart homes, and get information, news, weather, and more using just their voice.

Amazon Marketplace

Shoppers think of Amazon.com as the place where they can buy almost anything they need to live their lives, but shoppers aren’t Amazon’s only customers. Small businesses rely on Amazon as a trusted partner to enable them to reach millions of customers worldwide and help them grow their businesses, while also providing them with a safe place to sell their products. We have teams at Amazon responsible for finding, engaging, working with, and innovating on behalf of small businesses to help them be successful — on and off Amazon.com. In 2017, over 300,000 U.S. based small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) were selling on Amazon, and during Prime Day customers ordered more than 40 million items from SMBs worldwide, growing their sales by more than 60 percent over Prime Day 2016.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Millions of customers currently leverage AWS cloud products and solutions to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability. Tens of thousands of customers use a broad range of AWS services. This has accelerated AWS’ pace in machine learning, artificial intelligence, internet of things, and serverless computing.

Business Development

The Business Development and Entertainment team includes Prime Video and Studios, Amazon Music, IMDb, Worldwide Advertising, Amazon Registry Services, and Corporate and Business Development. These teams drive new businesses that innovate in new or emerging market segments.

eCommerce

When customers shop on Amazon.com, they expect a safe, simple and consistent experience. A large number of systems and services contribute to that experience, from identity services to massive data warehouses and innovations, specifically focusing on managing the incredible scale and complexity of operating one of today’s most successful businesses. eCommerce Foundation (eCF) owns the core systems, services and infrastructure behind Amazon.com, delivering key aspects of the Amazon shopping experience, managing hosting for Amazon websites worldwide, and creating the services that technology teams across the company use to develop and run their systems.

Kindle, Digital Content and Publishing

With a mission to make every book ever written available in minutes, the Kindle, Digital Content and Publishing teams have pioneered services like Kindle Direct Publishing to empower independent authors to reach new audiences, and Kindle Unlimited subscription reading for avid eBook readers. Innovation doesn’t stop there, this team continues to build new tools for authors to publish and distribute their work, and readers to access a growing variety of content on any device, anywhere in the world.

Retail

From a garage-based start-up in 1995, to one of the world’s most respected brands today, Amazon has grown to become an integral part of customers’ lives. Amazon’s Retail organization is at the center of that evolution. We’re the people behind the Amazon.com website and customer experience, beloved programs like Amazon Prime, Amazon Go, Whole Foods, private label products, and all of Amazon’s retail categories. Whether it’s technical teams pushing the boundaries of what is possible using machine learning, or business teams launching new voice ordering capabilities, employees innovate on behalf of customers at a massive scale — and we’re just getting started.

Worldwide Operations and Customer Service

Amazon’s mission is "to be Earth’s most customer-centric company”, and our Operations and award-winning Customer Service teams are at the heart of that mission. Supported by innovative world-class technologies, our global network of FCs, delivery stations and customer service teams are dedicated to supporting customers worldwide. Together, we create, we build, and we take ownership for what we do — whether we’re developing new technology in-house, launching a new Amazon Fulfillment Center, or delighting our customers by delivering packages directly to them. We’re constantly creating the ideas, services, and products that make life easier for millions of customers.

Some of the best ways to learn about our peculiarities are to explore our Leadership Principles and to read Jeff Bezos’ letters to shareholders. Jeff has written this letter annually for the past 20 years, and each provides insight into our culture and how we operate. Each letter also ends with a key point from his 1997 letter, “our core values and approach remain unchanged. We continue to aspire to be Earth’s most customer-centric company."

Here are some highlights:

• We “focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner” (1997 shareholder letter).
• We believe “some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors… If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before… But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups” (2015 shareholder letter).
• “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness, and risk acceptance mentality normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups” (2015 shareholder letter).
• A “one-size-fits-all thinking can turn out to be only one of the pitfalls. We work hard to avoid it… and any other large organization maladies we can identify” (2015 shareholder letter).
• When it comes to obsessing over customers, we’re in it for the long haul. “A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, and taste” (2016 shareholder letter).
• Every day is Day 1 at Amazon. In Amazon’s 2016 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos said that, “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline… And that is why it is always Day 1."
• “We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations. Instead, we write narratively structured memos and silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” These papers generally range from one to six pages and articulate the project goal(s), approach to addressing it, outcome, and next steps” (2017 shareholder letter).
• We “believe in building a culture of high standards. Naturally and most obviously, because we’ll build better products and services for customers. More subtle: a culture of high standards is protective of all the “invisible” but crucial work that goes on in every company; it’s the work that gets done when no one is watching. In a high standards culture, doing that work well is its own reward. Once you’ve tasted high standards, there’s no going back” (2017 shareholder letter).

• Explore how we continue to evolve our communities, build a diverse work environment, and push for a sustainable world.
• Learn about our culture, opportunities for veterans, and more.
• Stay up to date with our Day One blog and get the latest about what’s happening at Amazon.
• Get to know our Seattle headquarters.
• Meet a few Amazonian dogs who work to delight and energize some of our offices.
• Browse Amazon Awards.