Level Up Newsletter & Community paid members were invited to join this live discussion with Ethan Evans & Ameesh Paleja (EVP at Capital One, exGoogle VP, exOfferUp CTO, Atom Tickets CoFounder & CEO, exAmazon Director) on "Ameesh's Career from Engineer to CEO & EVP".

​​Topics discussed:
1) Deciding to move from Microsoft to Amazon.
2) Deciding to switch to Ethan's new team where Ethan was a new Senior Manager.
3) Decision to change from engineer to manager.
4) Going from a big company (Amazon) to founding a startup (Atom Tickets) and how Ameesh decided to take the plunge.
5) What is different about being a startup founder vs a corporate leader?
6) Deciding when to give up the CEO role (leave a startup) and go back to corporate.
7) What did Ameesh bring from his startup experience back to corporate?
8) Career setbacks and how to overcome them.
9) Now that Ameesh is in huge roles (1000s of people), what are the new challenges?
​10) What traits drove Ameesh's rapid rise.


​Backstory: Ethan and Ameesh
​I (Ethan) joined Amazon in 2005. Ameesh joined my new team as the most senior engineer. The team was 6 people. Ameesh was the only SDE II, with 4 total years of experience. One team member had 2 years, one had 1 year, and 3 were new college grads. Thus, Ameesh had more experience than the other 5 members combined.

​Ameesh is a natural leader and took the role of lead engineer on the first version of Prime Video.

​While working with me, Ameesh was promoted first to SDE III, then switched to Manager. He was promoted to Senior Manager (Amazon L7) while working on Prime Video.

​Ameesh and I switched to video games and then to build the Amazon Appstore. Ameesh moved to Orange County to be closer to his family. He built a new office for the Amazon Appstore, ultimately with 300 people, and was promoted to Director (Amazon L8).

​Ameesh left Amazon to found his own startup, Atom Tickets.


About Ameesh Paleja
​​Ameesh is an EVP at Capital One, a Board Member at Everchron, and an Advisor to The Professional Collegiate League.

​​Prior, Ameesh served as VP of Engineering at Google, CTO at OfferUp, CoFounder & CEO at Atom Tickets, and Director at Amazon (where he started as a Sr. Software Engineer).

​Follow Ameesh on LinkedIn:   / ameesh  


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About Ethan Evans:
In Ethan's 15+ years at Amazon, he led global teams of 800+ and invented wellknown businesses and products such as Prime Video, Amazon Video, Amazon Appstore, Merch by Amazon, Prime Gaming (formerly Twitch Prime), and Twitch Commerce.

70+ patents.
Reviewed 10,000+ resumes, conducted 2,500+ interviews, and 1,000+ hires.
Was an Amazon Bar Raiser and Bar Raiser Core Leader, responsible for training and maintaining Amazon's group of interview outcome facilitators.
Helped advocate for and draft the Amazon Leadership Principle (LP) “Ownership” — the words, “They never say ‘that’s not my job.’” are Ethan's.

Ethan's LinkedIn:   / ethanevansvp  

Ethan's leadership development courses https://maven.com/ethanevans (live online) and https://ethanevans.mykajabi.com/ (ondemand)

Become a Level Up member: https://levelupwithethanevans.substac...