Heather Buchel

Work

As a front-end engineer, my area of focus is accessibility and user interface development. I love working in the UX space and collaborating with designers to build accessibility-driven experiences. I have experience building design systems and UI for products in large, global organizations.

Current work

Currently, I work as a front-end engineer at Amazon in AWS. I work with other front-end engineers, software development engineers and UX designers in the Amplify org to build our open source UI library Amplify UI.

Future work

I enjoy working on the front-of-the-front end. You can find a great write-up of this position by Brad Frost. Essentially, this means I'm interested in roles where:

  • I'm able to influence design and can work closely with UX and UI designers. I like bridging the gap between the design world and engineering, and bringing the two together.
  • I'm able to influence early product design decisions to ensure we're building accessible solutions.
  • I'm able to focus on UI development; this can include a focus on CSS and the presentational side of the front-end space, working with design systems and creating component libraries, performance and cross-browser testing, accessibility testing, etc.
  • I'm able to collaborate with back-end engineers to ensure our work on the back-end supports our UX and vice versa.

Previous work

Amazon Advertising

2019 to 2022: I worked at Amazon in the Advertising org. Part of this time I worked as a design technologist, building landing pages and prototyping new ad axperiences on Amazon.com. During this time, I transitioned to a front-end engineering role so that I could support our ad products for high traffic events.

Amazon Fulfillment

2017 to 2019: I worked at Amazon in the Amazon Fulfillment Technologies org as a design technologist. I worked with a small team of UX designers to create a component library for our design system. I also built prototypes to help vet UX designs and to assist with UX research.

Consulting

2011 to 2017: I worked at a small design and development consulting shop as a front-end developer. Here, I worked with clients from government, university, and municipal organizations to build websites in content management systems (DNN, Drupal, Wordpress) and custom .NET solutions.