This as told essay is based on a conversation with Abhinav Bohra, a senior applied scientist at Amazon. He is in his thirties and lives in Seattle. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
For most of my career, everything I built lived and died within 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 built a reputation within the company, I didn’t build much outside of it. People in the industry outside of Amazon were publishing research articles about the same problems I was solving, and I never joined the conversation.
Ultimately, I realized that without a public record of my work, I was missing out on opportunities to speak at industry events, serve on conference committees, and build a reputation that could help me if the need ever arose. find a new job. When it came to professional opportunities outside of Amazon, it felt like I was starting from scratch.
The lesson I learned was that internal reputation doesn’t travel. Mine biggest career regret is how long it took me to show up outside the company. I would have been a few years further along if I had realized this sooner.
I developed rules for myself about how to share my work outside of Amazon
At first I was hesitant to publish externally. I treated everything within a mile of my day job as radioactive, which meant I didn’t share anything publicly. There are processes for external work from publishers, but that can require documentation and review, and I didn’t want to go through that process.
Eventually, I realized I could do remote work without using proprietary data or information. The data was proprietary, but my ideas and research were not.
Take a problem I worked on a few years ago: how do you do that? train a good AI model when you have almost no labeled data? Research teams everywhere are hitting that wall.
I have developed some rules for myself. If there is a problem in published research, it is a conversation. If it only exists in our codebase, it isn’t. Non-public data, internal metrics, customers, code, roadmaps, and unreleased products are all off the table. If I’m still unsure, I won’t share.
I published external research and strengthened my presence on LinkedIn
I was amazed at how many meaningful technical discussions were still possible without revealing anything proprietary.
In 2021, I began taking steps to share more of what I learned, and about a year later, I published my first research paper. Publishing articles opened the door for me to review the work of other researchers and has helped me building relationships in the industry.
Ultimately, I was able to secure some outside speaking opportunities. I think the published research and the experience of reviewing the work of other researchers made the difference.
Post on LinkedIn also became part of my strategy. I shared my research, technical ideas and conference work. I wasn’t trying to be an influencer; I was just trying to build a professional identity that wasn’t tied to a single employer.
More opportunities have opened up since I started sharing my work
In recent years, the public market bet has grown in ways I can point to rather than just describe.
I have since become Challenge Co-Chair for ACM RecSys 2026, an international conference focused on recommendation systems. I reached out, explained my background, research and assessment, and said I was interested in serving on the organizing committee.
After the organizers reviewed my background and we spoke on the phone, I was appointed. Reaching out got me thinking, but the work behind the first email made this opportunity possible.
I also participated in a mentorship program through John Hopkinswhere I advise start-up companies on AI and technical strategy.
The external work has made my internal work better
Building an external reputation isn’t just about having accomplishments on my resume.
I think the work I was doing inside Amazon would have gotten better faster if I had started communicating with people outside the company sooner.
When you explain your thoughts in a paper or on a conference stage, you are writing for people with no context and no reason to be polite. The weak spots in your work quickly surface. Strangers make the best reviewers precisely because they don’t owe you anything.
My remote work has helped me gain more confidence at Amazon over the years. I think the biggest change was that I felt more comfortable coming up with an idea before I had every detail perfectly thought out.
Keeping up with AI and professional development can feel like a second job
AI learning can be a unofficial second job. It’s valuable and exciting, but it also blurs the line between professional development and personal time. Outside of my day job, I spend evenings and weekends researching retrieval and recommendation systems and submitting research papers on the topic.
I enjoy the work, so I don’t want to call it purely negative. But it does affect the balance between work and private life. There are evenings or weekends when I should probably disconnect, but I end up spending time on AI because I know the field is rapidly evolving.
AI creates opportunities, but also creates a learning burden. For people who work close to the field, continuous learning has quietly become part of the job, even if it happens outside of work.
Tech workers need to build something that outsiders can see
It’s valuable to have a public record of your work if your career ever takes an unexpected turn. Life can be uncertain. Layoffs may follow. There would be one difficult labor market that makes it difficult to find a new job.
You don’t want to spend years developing tools, solutions and expertise, leave a company and feel like you have to start from scratch because everything you built was proprietary and you can’t share it.
My advice to other people working in technology is to ensure that you have a profile outside your company that allows someone to understand the value you can provide.
That doesn’t mean you’re sharing proprietary information or violating a non-disclosure agreement. There are other ways to build a public record. For me, that means publishing independent research, speaking at industry conferences, reviewing the work of other researchers, and getting involved with organizations related to my field.
I wish I had started earlier.
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