Software at Scale 54 - Community Trust with Vikas Agarwal

Vikas Agarwal is an engineering leader with over twenty years of experience leading engineering teams. We focused this episode on his experience as the Head of Community Trust at Amazon and dealing with the various challenges of fake reviews on Amazon products.

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Highlights (GPT-3 generated)

[0:00:17] Vikas Agarwal's origin story.

[0:00:52] How Vikas learned to code.

[0:03:24] Vikas's first job out of college.

[0:04:30] Vikas' experience with the review business and community trust.

[0:06:10] Mission of the community trust team.

[0:07:14] How to start off with a problem.

[0:09:30] Different flavors of review abuse.

[0:10:15] The program for gift cards and fake reviews.

[0:12:10] Google search and FinTech.

[0:14:00] Fraud and ML models.

[0:15:51] Other things to consider when it comes to trust.

[0:17:42] Ryan Reynolds' funny review on his product.

[0:18:10] Reddit-like problems.

[0:21:03] Activism filters.

[0:23:03] Elon Musk's changing policy.

[0:23:59] False positives and appeals process.

[0:28:29] Stress levels and question mark emails from Jeff Bezos.

[0:30:32] Jeff Bezos' mathematical skills.

[0:31:45] Amazon's closed loop auditing process.

[0:32:24] Amazon's success and leadership principles.

[0:33:35] Operationalizing appeals at scale.

[0:35:45] Data science, metrics, and hackathons.

[0:37:14] Developer experience and iterating changes.

[0:37:52] Advice for tackling a problem of this scale.

[0:39:19] Striving for trust and external validation.

[0:40:01] Amazon's efforts to combat abuse.

[0:40:32] Conclusion.