Kat Hetzel-Budd

Software Development Engineer II

AmazonSmile, Accounting Systems · October 2019 - Present

Working as a member of AmazonSmile's accounting engineering team, which processes all monetary donations generated on smile.amazon.com and distributes the donations to charities. Currently helping to rebuild AmazonSmile's accounting systems onto a serverless architecture.

• Helped build a Java-based job scheduling workflow that manages all accounting jobs. Implemented some of the individual accounting jobs, using AWS StepFunctions and Glue jobs in Scala.

• Currently working on designing serverless versions of existing legacy services. Helping to redesign charity data information service using new RESTful APIs. Helping redesign an existing external notification service from a traditional service to a serverless architecture, saving the team hardware costs and reducing team operational overhead.

• Gave talks on operational best practices within the team - did a deep dive on amazon's internal CI/CD system and proposed new best practices for our existing CI systems. As a result of this work, heading a project to move half of the team's existing CI/CD pipelines to fully automated testing and deployment by end of year.

• Performed a major refactor a legacy service to allow for internationalization

• Involved with the hiring process in Amazon - currently shadowing interviews and helping to teach SDE bootcamps for new Amazon engineers.

Software Development Engineer I

Amazon Alexa - Text Processing and Tokenization · February 2018 - October 2019

Worked as a member of the Alexa Speech international text transformation and tokenization team. Specifically, was the team subject matter expert on the creation, development, and testing of finite state transducers, particularly for Hindi, Alexa's first bilingual, multi-script text transformation model.

• Developed a finite state transducer (FST) based model that standardized how the Hindi language was represented within Alexa. This tool was instrumental in ensuring that all internal Alexa data for Hindi was transformed to a standardized representation for both Hindi and English text. The design for this particular model is now used as the base design for any multi-script, multi-language text transformation model within Alexa.

• Defined best practices and development techniques for an obscure technology stack (Thrax, a language for writing FST grammars). Gave regular tech talks and wrote most of the team's onboarding and best practices documentation.

• Using Python and Thrax, custom built a set of testing and dashboarding tools for evaluating the performance of FST-based models, including a way to develop unit and integration tests. Created an automated process for pushing internal releases of the FST-based models.

• Mentored a graduate student SDE intern by providing technical guidance, design doc and code reviews, and weekly one-on-ones. During the internship, the intern expanded the team's model-running Java service and C++ engine to be able to handle a new type of text transformation model for formatting punctuation on Echo screens.

Software Development Engineering Intern

Amazon Go/Books · May 2017 - August 2017

Designed, researched, and implemented a Notifications application that facilitates communication between Amazon corporate and store managers Stored the notifications with DynamoDB (AWS) and implemented a service using Java and XML that is able to get, create, retrieve all notifications by store, edit, and delete notifications from the database. Created a full UI for the application using AngularJS, implementing a dashboard with multiple views, such as a view of all notifications intended for a certain store, a detailed view of a notification, and the abilities to create, delete, and edit notifications. Implemented two different user roles, a creator and a user.

Utilized AngularJS to create a 'Store Manager Dashboard' - a consolidation of information necessary to the Amazon Go and Books stores. Integrated information from several other dashboards into one clean, master dashboard that shows a snapshot of several vital store functions including notifications and details relating to in-store operations. Fully unit tested the dashboard using Jasmine, an AngularJS testing framework

Software Development Engineering Intern

BNY Mellon · June 2016 - August 2016

Worked as member of the Intelligent Business Form development team in an agile application development environment. Created a real-time XML validator for use in an internal API, using both a custom XML parser and Java’s XML validation library. Designed a preemptive server monitoring structure and functionality from start to finish using Dynatrace. Created a type-ahead feature using XML and JavaScript for BNY Mellon's Intelligent Business Form application.

Advisor/Tutor - Python Specialist

Codecademy · March 2016 - October 2016

Tutored nearly 200 Codecademy Pro learners and debugged code in a variety of programming langagues, emphasizing the important of syntax styling and the intelligent structuring of data.

Primarily taught and tutored Python, but also frequently assisted with Java, Ruby, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Git, and Bash (Linux) command line scripts.

She Innovates Hackathon 2016 First Place

Susan Hicks Memorial Scholarship - First Ever Recipient

Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies - Departmental Scholarship

Semi-Finalist - Randall Family Big Idea Competition