Colin Sanders
Senior engineer at Amazon building high-scale infrastructure and AI tooling. Shipping products on the side.
Featured Project
An AI-powered Mandarin learning app. I'm building it while learning the language myself, using it to work through the gaps that existing tools leave open.
The first release focuses on conversation practice: real-time voice conversations with an AI tutor. Next is a full curriculum system with structured lessons and spaced repetition.
AI has handed us tools that can orchestrate learning, adapt to individual levels, and surface information instantly. Most of the assumptions behind how we teach and learn haven't caught up. I'm interested in what happens when you rebuild from those new primitives.
Experience
Senior engineer at Amazon, currently in the vulnerability management org. I build systems that route security vulnerabilities to the right owners with enough context to act on them.
High-throughput data infrastructure
Security signals come from everywhere: host agents, network scanners, container monitoring, cloud configuration, network telemetry, access management changes. The systems I build ingest millions of these signals per second, enable security engineers to precisely assess risk in real time, and route it to the teams responsible.
Developer tooling and rule engines
Engineers need to define rules for how findings get classified and routed, and test those rules before they go live. I've built interpreters and execution engines for custom rule languages and scanning platforms, and preview systems that simulate rule changes against petabyte-scale production data.
AI-assisted operations
When a vulnerability shows up, it is critical to figure out who owns the affected system and whether it's exploitable in context. I built MCP tools that augment and enhance this research, searching internal documentation and ticket history to find ownership and assess exploitability. Human processes that took weeks are converging on seconds.
Past work
Centralized congestion control infrastructure that restored scanning across millions of AWS accounts after emergency throttling. Detection authoring tooling and interfaces for cloud compliance scanning systems. Integration platform for Amazon Business external partners.
About
Based in Seattle. At Amazon, I lead an engineering team and review MCP tooling for the broader GenAI community. I also run workshops on AI-accelerated development.
Outside of work: published author, currently learning Mandarin, and increasingly interested in knowledge and intelligence as subjects in themselves.
Education
MS Computer Science, University of Alabama
BS Computer Science, University of Alabama