Eighteen months ago, Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels launched a fellowship program with a specific premise: give technology leaders working on the world’s hardest problems something more valuable than money.
The Now Go Build CTO Fellowship has since grown to support 24 technologists across four cohorts focused on disaster management, climate resilience, health and food security, and education. Unlike typical corporate grant programs that write checks and move on, this one offers something harder to quantify—access to the people who built one of the world’s largest cloud platforms.
Fellows get direct mentorship from AWS’s senior engineers and tap into the AWS Heroes volunteer community. They meet in person at major industry events like AWS’s re:Invent conference and the UN’s AI for Good Summit in Geneva. They even get to learn how to write like Amazonians through workshops run by Amazon’s internal writing bar raisers.
“Realizing the full potential that technology offers to solve these pressing issues takes more than just financial investment,” Vogels said. “It requires a dedicated focus on nurturing and developing the technical expertise and innovation capabilities of the leaders in these spaces.”
The constraints these technologists face make that community critical. They work with limited funding and infrastructure challenges in remote regions, deploying solutions where lives depend on technology working in the field.
It’s about creating a community of leaders tackling some of the world’s most pressing problems with technology, often under conditions that would stop most engineers in their tracks. It’s also about sharing their stories.
As builders, it’s our job to abstract away the complex, to find elegant solutions for hard problems. When we get it right, it can be a beautiful thing. But we need to avoid the temptation to engineer for the sake of engineering. That’s why the work that the Fellows are doing and the community they have built is so important.
Watch the full series on All Things Distributed.