Solutions Architect, Central Government
Amazon Web Services

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My name is Natasha,

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and I am a solutions architect at Amazon Web Services.

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So in terms of what a solutions architect does, my particular job involves

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helping customers in the central government sector to build technical solutions

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on a cloud technology platform called Amazon Web Services.

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I have done this job for a year and a half now, and I also have a specialism

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in analytics and big data on AWS.

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So in terms of analytics, data and the amount of data

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that some older companies hold has become really, really important.

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So my role in the analytics space is to help customers

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take their data and make something meaningful out of it.

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This may be anything from building an air pollution dashboard,

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to building a fraud detection capability by scanning lots of data.

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So my most favourite part of my role is being able to help people all day, every day.

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I really kind of enjoy the part of my role that involves teaching people

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about the cloud, and seeing them go from zero to hero with their skill set.

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I’m also in the public sector team, which means I deal

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with a lot of customers that have a wider impact on communities.

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It makes me feel personally really proud that the work

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I’m doing has an impact on a lot of people across the UK.

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So in terms of my career journey, I stayed in school until I was 16.

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I wanted to be a veterinary nurse at first,

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so I went to uni to study equine science and veterinary studies.

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I didn’t know I wanted to work in technology

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until my early twenties, and I found my first job in tech

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basically working as an office manager in the City of London,

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and I asked someone to mentor me, who was on that team.

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They said yes and I became an IT service desk analyst.

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I then spent time going from the finance sector to the media sector.

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I taught myself how to code, so my first coding language was Python.

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Took my foundational AWS certification, became a software developer

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and a cloud engineer, and then joined AWS two years later, and here I am.

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So something I would tell my younger self

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is that you don’t have to have it all figured out when you leave school.

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I remember teachers telling me, you have to choose your career path

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now and you have to choose whether you are going to uni now.

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It was all very kind of scary for me at the time,

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as I had no idea what I was going to do when I left school.

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Definitely be comfortable within yourself with not being perfect.

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Know that it’s fine to make mistakes and not to get it right first go.

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And if I was to tell myself anything at the start of my career in tech, it would be to be comfortable

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in not always having the answer at my fingertips.