Silas Brown Email and Phone Number

Leading technical development and design of software that studios and creators use to deliver media into Prime Video.

I led a 2-team (12-member) engineering group in designing and building complex, large scale software systems, that enable independent film producers and large studios to deliver and publish video onto the Amazon Video service. Under my guidance, by week 8, my team had eliminated 150 customer tickets, created comprehensive reporting software showing any processing failures, corrected 7 separate causes of more than 8k failures, and established alarms to alert the team if the issues recurred. By week 16, I had led the team to launch a new delivery system and built the first ever Tier-1 Studio portal for Amazon Video, shortening the feedback loop with our large partners from 5 days to 10 minutes. Using the new portal and delivery system to process over 15k submissions, in multiple languages, we then launched the first ever multi-lingual video experience for Amazon customers. We achieved 100% coverage of 7 primary languages on more than 5k titles available in over 267 countries. In Nov 2017, I was called on by senior leadership to prepare, lead and present a “Tech Talk” to all of Amazon. For the event, I directed product managers, engineers and designers across the organization in preparing demonstration booths, advertising, and awards for attendees. The talk was lauded by recruiting as “setting the bar” for all “Tech Talks” they had seen. I also organized a weekly Operational Performance Review helping 5 sibling teams in the organization to improve operational and engineering practices, grew my team from 7 to 12 developers, and promoted 3 developers and 1 manager to their next level.

I managed a 2-team engineering and operations group responsible for the lifecycle of video rights on Amazon Video. We launched Amazon Video to over 267 countries around the globe in December 2016. This single launch required building software and operations processes to support 1.36 million rights records, more than had ever been processed in Amazon Video’s 10-year history. As part of the launch we designed a new offer model which is now being presented by top engineers to Amazon groups worldwide showing how it enabled Amazon Video to scale to millions of viewers.I lead my operations manager through setting metrics and goals for his team, improving from 57% to 95% on-time processing while working against an 8x month-over-month growth in rights. We then created new mechanisms with executive level visibility to align 4 external business teams working in the new country-by-country licensing schemes required by studios.We grew the operations team from 5 to 10 and produced the only mid-level developer hire in the org in 2016. I created a sprint board process to help team’s leaders and recruiting to ‘team-up’ and increase response rate on LinkedIn connections. Because this process increased response rates from below 10% to above 28% we extended this process to peer development managers in the Amazon Video Catalog organization. During this time, my teams mentored and promoted 6 members to their next level including two senior level promotions to my same level.

I was tapped as the single-threaded leader running a multi-team launch for the new Amazon Channels program. This new program delighted customers with unlimited streaming for 30 add-on subscriptions including Showtime, Starz and recently HBO. I led changes spanning from the data model to client services on the technical side and acquisition and encoding of an excess of 22k movies and television shows on the business side. The launch was delivered in less than 3 months and netted hundreds of thousands of signups and millions of streams in the first 30 days after launch. This program has continued as one of the strongest growing business lines at Amazon Video.While running the encoding platform, I led a multi-team effort in the supply chain to let customers, for the first time on Amazon Video, listen to audio in their preferred language. I coordinated engineers and product managers spanning from the studios, to ingestion, to playback, to website and to individual device support.