AWS Distinguished Eng: Learning From 3000 Incidents And How Engineering Is Changing | Marc Brooker

About this episode

Ryan Peterman interviews Marc Brooker about technical learnings from cloud system postmortems and the evolving landscape of software engineering with AI.

In this episode, I talked to Marc Brooker, a distinguished engineer at AWS who started there as a new grad and rose through the ranks. We discussed technical learnings from 3,000+ cloud system postmortems, how software engineering is changing with AI, how to find impactful problems and much more. 🔶 My keyboard Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/u3GjIXP9N0s • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1qX2GfpbzxzGpGvDZVINdO?si=wsDGZo9PTbCNalKVybFVnA • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835 • Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/aws-distinguished-eng-learnings-from 𝗘𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • Post we discussed on hobbies and apparent expertise: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html • Post on software engineering changing: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/02/07/you-are-here.html • Post about Senior engineers and AI: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03/20/ic-leadership.html • Post on Junior engineers and AI: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03/25/ic-junior.html 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀: 0:00 - Intro 1:27…

People in this episode

Host: Ryan Peterman

Guest: Marc Brooker

Topics covered

• cloud systems
• software engineering
• AI impact
• postmortems
• problem-solving

Keywords

• AWS
• cloud systems
• software engineering
• AI
• postmortems
• technical learnings
• engineering advice

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: AWS

More episodes of The Peterman Pod

• Co-Creator of Haskell: Functional Programming, Thinking in Types, Useless Languages | Simon Jones · June 8, 2026 · 1h 28m
• Turing Award Winner: P vs NP, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Quantum Computation | Avi Wigderson · June 1, 2026 · 2h 16m
• Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling · May 25, 2026 · 2h 2m
• Creator of C++: Bell Labs, Negative Overhead Abstraction, Mistakes | Bjarne Stroustrup · May 18, 2026 · 1h 59m
• Harvard Professor: CS50, What Matters More Than CS, Lecturing Well | David J Malan · May 11, 2026 · 1h 4m
• PyTorch Eng Director: Promo Hacking, Industry Shifts, Regrets | John Myles White · May 4, 2026 · 44 min