Colm is a fairly badass engineer. He was a senior principle when I left. Sounds like they made another level since then and he jumped into VP. Somewhat makes sense as he leads the business in both a technical and business sense. Amazon’s traditional issue is they only know how to level managers. Turns out when the company starts accruing some really senior people you have to accommodate them.
This is a fairly fluffy piece of writing. His internal writings were much deeper.