Adrian SanMiguel

Adrian, what are you doing?

I am a lead architect and effectively field CTO for AWS and our technology partner of center of excellence. Basically, we take the top 50 to 60 partners, we double down on them and want to invest additional time, resources, capacity, and developmental effort to help them get bigger, be leaner, and do things in a more technology savvy way.

Cool, so ignore the lens, just look at me. So what we're doing right now, as we talked about earlier, is everything is changing so quickly. And it is affecting how we work on a day to day basis, how we live, how we hire, how we build teams, all of that stuff.

Absolutely.

So, tell me a little bit about your background before you were a field CTO, how did you come up?

Coming up is always an interesting story. Started off as a bench IT tech for a tire shop down in South Texas. But the owner was adamant that I earned my keep and if there wasn't enough IT work to do, you're gonna learn how to reach our tires, you're gonna learn how to balance the line, rotate. So I picked up that as a bit of a skill set along the way. From there to a bank security admin from there, consistently growing and being pulled into the next challenge and being identified as somebody with propensity to learn a new technology or establish myself as a bit of a domain expert. And it was always constantly being sought versus going out and trying to find for myself. Been a bit of an interesting journey and leaned into that as a superpower to continue working to build myself, build others and kind of set that legacy of the day that I leave that's fine. As long as there's some sort of artifact or leave behind or mentees that can continue carrying the flag. For me, that's been a marker of success.

The last stop before AWS, I was a enterprise support architect for Rackspace of all places.

But I got to AWS, I was assigned to cover Rackspace again.

What is your favorite part about these jobs? You talked about it sounds like curiosity is a big part of what kind of times you. These are all different jobs, but there's a progression there. What's that progression for you? What is the thing that attracts you and that keeps you motivated?

The level of difficulty and complexity of the problem. If it was just knock out, bang out tickets one after another, I'd probably still be at the knock I was at in 2007.

At that point, I really learned to develop, "Hey, I want to learn more. What is this? How can I use this? Hey, how does storage work?" It's one of the things that I constantly try to foster in my mentees, my teams, my leadership of if we don't instill a culture of curiosity of, "Hey, what is it?" And empowering folks to go and do the thing is a part of, less of a side hustle, more of a side quest. We are going to see stronger, better, more hungry type of architects and engineers as we go.

Well, with the change and the increased amount of AI tools, the tooling that's coming out there,

what do you see?

There's talk of older engineers are having trouble adapting, not wanting to play, junior engineers being completely cut out of the marketplace. What are you seeing right now?

I'm seeing a kind of contra narrative in that regard. I would consider myself an older engineer given the skunk marks here.

I literally leverage AI agent tools, AI coding tools on a daily basis, using hero, using cursor, using cloud code, whatever I need to help me solve a problem or get to that next step. What I've been using a lot lately is using cursor to help check my work. "Hey, here's the code that I put out. Here's the architecture I'm laying out." This is the scenario. Does this work? Will this work? I'm doing everything from performance benchmark testing on something like Solaris of all things and emulating it on a VM all the way to, "Hey, we're writing production code for a monitoring in a box type solution that we give customers and partners that don't have an observability stack." For us, it's older engineers. I feel it's a bit of a superpower to use what's in our brain and have a buddy ride along, especially when there may not be another domain expert in the place that you are. What I'm seeing with junior engineers, they're following along. It's almost like that middle step in between junior and senior engineers where the junior can attach and learn and lean on and learn to be a bit of a good prompt engineer to say, "Hey, I'm a junior engineer. This is where I work. This is the problem that I'm trying to solve." Help me understand as we go to go and build the thing, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? There are alternative ways. That way they continue to go and error check, see the different opportunities to grow. Who knows? One of the things you can say, "Hey, option A, we kick it out in Python. Option B, we can click it out in Ruby." At that point, the engineer has an opportunity to be like, "All right, cool. Which of these two languages am I leaning towards?" and continually use that to grow.

But you approach things with a sense of curiosity. I would argue, and I'd like your opinion on this.

Computer science rarely teaches communication skills.

Absolutely.

It sounds like communication skills, we're not prioritizing for tech stack anymore. We're prioritizing for personality stack, communication stack.

Yep.

A lot of people could get left behind.

What are your concerns on that side of that?

It's definitely something I've been seeing. It's something I've raised up to my director and my skip level director.

We have tech in spades in our group and within the industry in total. There was always the old joke of, "Hey, this is somebody that belongs in a dungeon clacking out code." You don't ever let Brian out of the cage. You just haven't been the dark writing code.

That's not viable anymore. We need that level of technical expertise, especially in front of C-levels at customers and partners.

You've got to be able to have the business understanding as well. We have done a very poor job in the industry saying that it matters, fostering it, teaching individual how to. I remember when I was coming up in school, there was zero emphasis on learning any business skills. "Hey, this is how P&L works. This is how grid planning works. This is how you do sprints. This is how you build endeavors and milestones into your launches."

What we're starting to do is require engagement, deep engagement being at the hip with partner development managers or account managers to start learning this out of the business. I'm in the middle of a training of building up the how's, what's and why's to soft skills, as we formerly called them, to help elevate those individuals. For many, and for many of my own mentees, they say it's scary.

Not the act of speaking to somebody in an authoritative way, the fact that they may not be able to do it effectively. The message I'm trying to share with them is, yes, it would help you tremendously if it's ultra effective, but you need to skin your knees along the way. You need to learn. This is how we learn. I didn't wake up and become a Twitch live streamer. I'll admit, I was a horrible speaker when I first started. It was just a train wreck.

Getting those at bats, being offered the opportunity to sit in front of these business decision owners is huge, as well as fostering these soft skills. I feel within the next maybe two or three years with AI coding agents and help bringing everybody up to a same consistent technology bar, the differentiator is going to be what do you do on the business side? Can you go hold a conversation with chief marketing officer, chief revenue chief sales officer? If you can, you're going to jump ahead of the pack. If you cannot, you're going to be left behind.

You do any hiring?

Absolutely.

How has AI changed your approach to hiring?

Oh, yeah. This is a popular and ultra controversial type of take,

as well as topic.

We in the early days were kind of open to a fault. We were okay with individuals coming to interviews and leveraging a coding agent to help them do the thing or answer questions on the fly and really demonstrate, hey, this individual is going out there and leaning in and trying to use the thing, trying to use it to get better. What we eventually saw was individuals just wholesale shipping code that was absolutely 100% made by a coding agent. We saw individuals leveraging live during the interviews, waiting for the hum, aha, and you hear the typing in the background and then literally reading it out word for word. What that had us do was really go through and set a policy of what extent we want to see AI agents involved in the hiring process. Because at the end of the day, we don't want to hire Claude. We don't want to hire Kero. We don't want to hire cursor. We want to hire the individual that's going to be interacting with those tools. If you've got the curiosity to go out and start leveraging it and have the humility to say, hey, I'm not so good at building a widget of some sort. I'm not that great in this language. I can leverage it to help fill the gap while I speed up. The concept of a ramp is kind of gone anymore. The expectation is on day one, you're effective and you can help build, grow, and establish additional business. Leveraging this to fill the gap is part of the hiring process has kind of been key to getting more folks on board a little bit faster and not necessarily needing to give them a 90, 120 day ramp to get them to where they're going to be effective with the tool, the service, the thing that they're going to be interacting with on a daily basis.

I'm trying to remember if I asked you this question, I've asked so many interviews. What is exciting you right now? It can be technology related or anything else, but for you, what is the thing right now that is exciting to you, they wish everybody knew about?

The thing that's exciting to me right now that I've been doing a lot of dabbling with is helping individuals understand the cost of not doing something. By that, I mean leverage, leaning into new and emerging technology, leaning into new and emerging business trends, and really paying attention to what marketing customers are going to be asking for. The most intense spot that I'm seeing this right now is the realization from a particular breed of partners where the old way of establishing revenue and additional margins, not only is it not gone, it's something that's not only is it now gone, something the customers don't want anymore. What they want is for folks to interact with them and raise value above the stack.

It's one thing to just make sure the web server is up. We want to be working with you to be that trusted advisor and building those aforementioned business skills to help the customer understand the cost of not doing something, help them understand and really serve as a building exercise of trust, competence, as well as capability with these customers where you're asking these hard questions, you're asking the CEO, "Hey, how much does it cost you every minute, hour, day that you're down?" Many of these customers have never been asked that by somebody in a tech role. It's disarming immediately and it helps open up that world of possibilities. For me personally, building up this skillset is something that I've been a wholesale dedicated and passionate about for about the last year. What I am seeing is in my patch of teams, individuals, partners, even with my mentees, it's going overwhelmingly well. I would much rather take slow progress with effort versus no progress with a ton of effort. What I am also seeing is many individuals coming to that realization, having that aha moment, "Hey, this isn't as tough and as scary as I thought it was. It isn't totally paralyzing to show up to a Toastmasters and learn how to have better public speaking type engagements and presence." These folks are just realizing that for the bulk of their career, they've been missing out. Giving them that opportunity to level up and build that level of differentiation is huge. Given that over the time you mentioned hiring, at Amazon I served as a tech lead for tech depth and tech breadth. Great, that's whatever. I rarely even ask questions about that. It was more about, "Help me understand what you do to help marry the tech things that you know and care about to something that a business owner will understand." Many of my questions were probing around that. As these individuals come through, I'm finding those that we approach in that way are succeeding hand over fist over those that we're not.

You're investing social capital to reap social equity.

Absolutely.

Makes a lot of sense. How many mentees do you have? What format do you mentor?

We have a internal tool called Amazon Mentoring, which is intended to track these engagements, but many of the times it never gets in there as some of my mentees are outside of Amazon. Right now I've got 44 active mentees. Those mentees have a small network of mentees as well.

It's interesting, we talk about it in sports. You've got the coaching tree. I've got my mentee tree. In one particular instance,

a lady that I've been working with for about three or four years now in a mentor-mentee relationship, she's got mentees that have mentees, which makes me feel great that these individuals are taking it to heart. They're building their own brand. They're putting their spin on it. They're investing that same amount of social capital downward. It's not just incumbent on me to just effectively be the individual spreading the news. If you want to take it, great. I'll take everybody on as a mentee. Scaling myself out, scaling the things that I'm passionate about and the tools that help me get where I'm at helps bring up the next generation in ways that we really never thought

about.