I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Amazon and I've been there since late '99. For most of my time at Amazon I've worked deep in the bowels of large distributed systems, though right now I'm working a tad closer to the business in the Digital Media Group. At one point in the past I was mentioned on the Gurupa wikipedia node (I swear that I wasn't the person who put it there). Maybe that was my "15 minutes". :-)

I love writing code, but I tend to spend most of the time shaming my colleagues into not writing new code. There are so many libraries out there already - and some of them are actually good - so it's a shame to rewrite these libraries from scratch if your intent is actually making money. Of course, if you have the time and financial resources, rewriting libraries as an academic exercise can be fun. So, in the future I would like to have a job where writing new code really is a requirement.