David Glick – 20 year Amazon veteran turned CTO #87
David Glick is the CTO of the FLEXE fulfillment technology platform. He is responsible for the design and development.
Before FLEXE, he spent nearly 20 years at Amazon, including five years as the VP of Fulfillment Technology, where he oversaw the development and functionality of the technology within Amazon’s fulfillment centers, as well as the technology for Amazon’s transportation
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A note from Grant
If you’ve ever wondered what the technology behind the scenes of some of today’s largest retailers looks like, you’re going to want to tune in as we catch up with Dave Glick, the CTO of Flexe, a warehousing and logistics company.
After getting his PhD from UNC Chapel Hill (Go Heels) in physics – I think this is our 3rd physicist turned technologist – Dave spent 20 years at Amazon building out their fulfillment and transportation systems, amongst a variety of other roles throughout the company, before leaving to join Flexe as their Chief Technology Officer.
When Dave is not making sure your order arrives on time, he holds down several advisory and humanitarian roles, including being a board member for Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking.
-Grant Ingersoll
Quotes
“I ended up having to deal with pricing errors. We went through the process of setting prices on promotions automatically and manually. And what we found was that every time a human was involved, defects were injected.”
“We were able to reduce pricing errors by 90 percent year over year.”
“Put the engineer close to the customer. Thats the number 1 piece of advice I’d have for an engineering leader.”
“You’re basically automating the walking. If you think about automating the robot arm that picks an item out of a bin, that is a super hard problem, and no one has ever cracked the code at scale for that. But if you think about picking up a 300 pound pod and bringing it to a human, that is super easy. Robots are really good at that.”
—David Glick
Key Milestones
- David started his career at Amazon back in the very early days. Amazon was still pretty small at that time. What were Amazon’s early days like?
- David spent 20 years at one company doing a lot of different things. How was he thinking about career growth during those years and how did it evolve and change?
- What were some of the roles David had at Amazon?
- What is large scale fulfillment technology?
- David Glick talks about Amazon’s culture and how its changed of the years
- How does David think about team building and what attributes does he look for in people?
Additional Resources
Learn more about FLEXE - https://www.flexe.com/
Connect with David Glick
LinkedIn
