Indian Amazon engineer shares how stepping out of his comfort zone shaped his career: ‘You always need to be innovating’

An India-based Amazon machine learning engineer, Suvendu Mohanty, shared his career journey in an interview with Business Insider. He recalled, “I got my Master’s in Computer Science in 2011, and like others, I got tracked into coding as a software engineer. I started my career as a Java engineer developing software applications. Six or seven years later, I came across the profile of machine learning.” An Indian Amazon engineer recalled leaving his comfort zone to embrace machine learning.(LinkedIn/Suvendu Mohanty) (Also read: Techies Rohan Vasishth and Faraz Siddiqi quit Amazon and Microsoft. Their AI firm just raised $4 million) At the time, machine learning was far from the booming sector it has now become. “The projects we got were almost always software engineering; machine learning projects were really, really hard to get,” he explained. Discovering machine learningMohanty pointed out how the education system had yet to properly integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning into the curriculum. “When you’re doing a master’s degree you can take a specialisation, or you are doing a Ph.D. But what about the millions of software engineers who are early in their career and are not formally trained?” he asked. Driven curiosity, he took free online resources and joined hackathon projects. “That got my manager’s attention. He hadn’t thought about it, but he told me, ‘Since you’re doing machine learning, we want to build something. Can you work with it?’ Technically I got exposure at work itself, even though it wasn’t full-blown.” Rising demand and misconceptionsAccording to Mohanty, the perception around machine learning has transformed. “Right now, ML is booming. Everyone is talking about ML. Back then, there was a fear that ML is difficult to grab at or difficult to get. They had a misconception; I had to step out of my comfort zone and take some initiative on my own interests.” He added, “I found out that machine learning was another stream of software engineering. There’s nothing magical about it.” Innovation and future signalsMohanty emphasised that innovation is vital for career growth. “ML is not always the solution. It’s one way to help you stay relevant in the market,” he said. To navigate this field, he advised professionals to follow authentic signals such as research papers, conferences and thought leaders. “For example, robotics is next. We need to identify, in the next five or 10 years, where the demand will be.” Life at AmazonReflecting on his role, Mohanty noted, “Three years back, I got into Amazon. Working at Amazon, you always need to be innovating. You need to be very competitive. That’s the part of Amazon I like most: The culture motivates you to build something and will never slow you down.”