I work on AI at Amazon. My biggest career regret is waiting years to build a reputation outside the company.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Abhinav Bohra, a senior applied scientist at Amazon. He’s in his 30s and lives in Seattle. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

For most of my career, everything I built lived and died inside Amazon.

I joined Amazon in 2019 as a data scientist and eventually became a senior applied scientist in 2024. My background is in AI recommendation systems, and I work on models that help determine which products shoppers see on Amazon.

While I was building a reputation inside the company, I wasn’t building much of one outside it. People in the industry outside Amazon were publishing…