In this episode of Beyond the Noise, Matt talks with Nicki Stone, a Principal Engineer who oversees development of the Amazon Shopping App. Nicki's path there runs through a finance desk where she taught herself to code out of boredom, one of the first coding boot camps in existence, a quarter-million-dollar hackathon win, and a startup that raised $1.8 million before an abrupt close.Nicki built a framework at AWS that unioned on-device and cloud ML models years before anyone was talking about edge inference, and she and Matt dig into why that architecture is only going to get more relevant as models keep shifting to the device. She also pulls back the curtain on what engineering at Amazon's scale looks like: 50 separate networking stacks that nobody shares, no monorepo, and why adding a single request header becomes a company-wide problem. Nicki explains the bet she's making to fix it.Plus: what she found under the hood at Instagram, Meta's code culture, and why AI makes her feel like "a kid in a candy shop" after 12 years in the industry.

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