Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President of Foundational Data Services at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her technique for spending time intentionally and prioritizing work-life balance called balcony-hopping. Mai-Lan explains how she created the concept of balcony-hopping and how it has helped her to be a better leader, mother, wife, and boxer. Corey and Mai-Lan discuss how in today’s age, attention is a form of currency and why it’s so important to be intentional with how and where you spend your attention. Mai-Lan also offers practical insights to anyone seeking to feel more productive, present, and balanced. 

Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec is Vice President, Foundational Data Services (FDS) at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leads a number of high-scale AWS cloud services that provide storage and streaming of petabytes or exabytes of data and essential building blocks for modern application architecture like queuing and notifications, monitoring, alarming, logging and reliability validation. Mai-Lan’s teams include some of AWS’ first and largest-scale services like Amazon S3 and Simple Queue Service (SQS) to more recent and fast-growing services like managed open source streaming (Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka).

Prior to joining Amazon, Mai-Lan spent almost 15 years in engineering and product leadership roles at technology companies including Microsoft and early stage startups. She began her technology career after serving in the U.S. Peace Corps in the Mopti region of Africa as a Forestry volunteer after earning her degree from University of California, San Diego.

At Amazon, Mai-Lan is an advisor to Asians@Amazon, creator and sponsor of internal leadership development programs for Amazon employees, and is passionate about AWS initiatives and cloud services that maximize human potential everywhere.

Mai-Lan has three children and lives in Seattle with her family. When she is not working on Amazon cloud services and spending time with her husband and kids, Mai-Lan trains primarily in boxing with additional practice in the martial art Savate.