Gitanjali Bhutani on taking risks, leadership, and why she still writes code at Amazon India

Growing up in Bengaluru, Gitanjali Bhutani was passionate about robots, not the towering mechanical giants of science fiction, but practical automatons that could serve food or help with household chores. 

Being part of a science-oriented household, her father, an engineer, and her sister, a doctor, helped with the curiosity factor. 

Her incessant questions like, 'Why does this have to be done by a person, or ‘what if I had to build a robot for this?’ became the deciding factor to choose engineering over medicine or law. It was also the closest to her dream of building robots that the world would use one day. 

Exploring the world of ecommerce

Today, Bhutani is one of Amazon's top technology leaders. As the Director of Software Development, she directs a 4,000-strong team that powers competitive pricing for millions of customers.

After completing her computer engineering degree from UVCE in Bengaluru, Bhutani completed her master’s and a PhD from BITS Pilani.

She started her career in 2005 with Lucent Technologies as a software development engineer, building 3G network components and their simulators.

“Nine years into that role, I thought I was becoming a little too specialised in telecom, and there was this whole world of ecommerce that was opening up. Amazon was becoming big in India, and ecommerce was no longer just about shopping, it was technology,” Bhutani recalls.

Joining Amazon in 2014 as a Level 5 software development engineer proved to be a culture shock for Bhutani. After six months, she wondered if she would even survive. The company's famous leadership principles were put in effect daily. 

"You are an L5, you have managers, lead engineers, everybody around you, but you are allowed to make the decision," she remembers. "You ask somebody, 'I'm going to do this,' and they will say, 'Go ahead and make the decision. Why are you telling me?'" she shares. 

The initial discomfort proved to be a catalyst for growth, and Bhutani realised that switching jobs was one of the best decisions she had made.

A year into the Amazon role, against her own expectations of “never becoming a people’s manager and sticking to just engineering and code”, Bhutani wanted to have a larger influence, to talk to the business and customers.

“I made the shift. At that point, I never thought I'd succeed as a manager, in my style of wanting to get everything done yesterday and wanting to know the little nitty-gritties of everything. I didn't think I'd succeed as a manager, but I thought it was worth the try,” she admits.

Owning the tech of competitive pricing

Bhutani became a manager, led different teams within the pricing org, and in 2019, grew to own the entire technology aspect of competitive pricing.

“In 2023, I started to lead the technology, the product, and the operations part of the entire competitive pricing business, which is a good 4,000+ size org,” she elaborates.

“The riskiest thing I’ve done is to become a business leader rather than just a tech leader. When I took over, I had seen all these processes from the outside, but there was nothing I knew about how these run internally. 

The risk of failure was very high. But I think at every stage in your life, you have to keep figuring out how to reinvent yourself and become more and more relevant. This was one of those,” she reflects.

As Director of Software Development, Bhutani’s role spans three critical dimensions. 

The first pillar involves building and maintaining the entire technological infrastructure of competitive pricing. “One part of the world is to build the entire tech infrastructure of competitive pricing, how do we automate all the algorithms to ensure we are automating more and more and getting the best prices across to our customers without manual intervention."

The second dimension focuses on product strategy and customer experience. The third pillar brings everything together through business operations. 

On any given day, Bhutani might be analysing customer feedback to identify pricing pain points, strategising the next breakthrough innovation in competitive intelligence, or ensuring her teams are "completely staying ahead and raising the bar on what we already have established very well." 

Bhutani believes in leading by example. 

“I cannot ask my team to do anything I wouldn’t myself. I am a hands-on leader,” she says.

Even as a director overseeing 4,000 people, she still writes and debugs code. "People tell me, 'You are a director, you shouldn't really be doing this,'" she laughs. "But I still write code, I still read code, debug code."

Bhutani’s journey has seen a learning curve with successes and challenges.

Challenges and successes

The transition from technical leader to holistic business leader was the biggest challenge, she says.

“I had several people tell me to think this through. My own manager, as he was guiding or mentoring me through the process, told me, 'Think it through. You may like it, or you may just hate it.'” she admits.

It took a year to understand how things worked, earn the trust of the team and “show them my most vulnerable self.”

An even more persistent challenge has been establishing her voice in rooms where she was often the youngest, or the only woman present. “Either it was, ‘You're too young,’ or the dismissive, ‘You don't know what you are talking about,’” she reflects.

This experience taught her an invaluable lesson that she passes on to others. “Ensure your voice is heard at the table and ensure there is a seat at the table for you. Otherwise, all that you do, all that your teams do, can just be nothing.”

Guided by her life principle of excellence—"no matter what I do, I want to do it really well", Bhutani has seen remarkable success in her career, both at  Lucent and Amazon. 

When she joined Amazon’s competitive pricing team, they operated at a certain scale. Today, the same system runs at “100x of that right now, and I'm not exaggerating. Just the way that we've automated, the way we've invented—customers are seeing much better prices, but the machinery behind it has evolved so much,” she says. 

Helping women in tech

Bhutani’s broader impact includes being passionate about helping women in tech. 

Very early in her career, she had women role models to look up to. She wants to be the same for women, especially for those starting their journeys.

“When I show up in forums and people say, “I listened to that talk,” or someone randomly messages me, “I was on maternity leave, I was going through a really bad phase, and just listening to what you said helped me come out of it and here I am”—it’s so satisfying. That’s something I count as, I’ve helped the world, and I want to be remembered for that,” she adds.

What can organisations do to sustain women at mid-career levels and support them in aspiring for leadership roles?

Citing her own example, she points out that flexibility is important. 

“When I joined Amazon, my daughter was less than a year old. She cried all the time and didn’t sleep. I worked close to home and if I had to go back from 12pm to 1.30pm, what would everyone think? When I told my manager, he said, “Can you please stop telling me this? It's your time. Go do what you want. You are getting work done, and I don't care whether you do it at 12 pm or 6 pm or whatever time.”

Amazon also offers a host of programmes for women that include Ramp Back, to support new mothers by offering flexible schedules and reduced workloads; Rekindle, a launch pad for women who have taken a break in their careers; Atlas, a program that bridges the gap between non-tech and tech roles and AmazeWiT, a networking platform for women to learn about innovative technologies and professional development.

“We also run a whole bunch of forums where we just have women share their stories. There is an “Ask Me Anything” program where we get senior women to share: “This is how I handled it when I came back from maternity,” or “when I was going through a tough time,” she shares. 

Bhutani mentors women one-on-one as well as in larger forums. She’s also a champion of the Amazon Future Engineer program.

At 42 years, Bhutani has an unconventional career goal.

“I want to continue to be the best at what I do. I will never retire. I have to keep myself sharp and connected to everything that’s going on, keep upskilling myself, so people don’t wonder, “Who’s that old lady in the room?”