Where are they now? Charlotte Fondren

For this Where Are They Now? segment, we catch up with Charlotte Fondren, a 2021 DPI Research Intern, a City Scholar in the spring of 2022, and a 2023 graduate of The Grainger College of Engineering.  

Name: Charlotte Fondren  

Current job title: Solutions architect, Amazon Web Services. 

 What is a solutions architect? 

I work with AWS customers within the aerospace and satellite industry. Think Blue Origin, SpaceX, those types of companies. When I introduce myself to customers, I say, “I’m your technical resource for anything AWS.”  

If they have an existing architecture or an existing workload on AWS, maybe they want to modernize it, they want to make sure it’s up to security best practices, stuff like that, I can help them. If they have an idea for a new workload — say they want to put GenAI on top of their geospatial data, then I can help them figure out what services to use, how to use them, and just architectural guidance.  

You can kind of think of AWS as LEGO blocks, so then we can give customers the overall plan for how to put them together, as well as sometimes we’ll show them a small aspect of it put together. AWS is very good at creating the LEGO blocks, but it's up to the cloud developers to put them together, so to speak. That’s where someone likes me comes in and can help customers navigate the 220-plus different types of blocks we have. 

When I first applied for this job, I had no idea what it was. I actually thought it was a software development job. When I went through the internship and the first week, I thought, this sounds like the best job ever. We get to do coding, but it’s not my main job. We just get to do a whole bunch of different things. 

How and why did you become interested in tech?  

My high school offered a series of engineering classes, and when I was a freshman, my mom convinced me to try one out. I ended up loving it. I originally wanted to do environmental engineering, then switched to civil engineering. But my freshman year of college, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the intro civil class, so I was looking for other majors to switch to within the engineering school.  

When I was younger, I had done a CS-type class and a program learning Scratch, which I thought was super fun. I also remembered that in the circuits unit in my physics class in high school, I really liked having that hands-on component. I thought computer engineering sounded cool, combining the CS part that I had thought I’d enjoy as well as the electrical and circuits part.  And I had a bunch of friends freshman year who were in the Electrical and Computer Engineering program.  

So my second semester I took the intro computer engineering and electrical engineering classes and really enjoyed them. And I officially transferred to ECE starting the in the spring of my sophomore year: the semester after I did the internship with DPI.   

How did that internship come about? 

I started college in the fall of 2020, so it was peak COVID. I was on campus, but there wasn’t that much to do. Second semester, in the spring of 2021, I got super involved with some RSOs like Society of Women Engineers, Women in ECE. I stumbled across DPI and the Research Intern program, and I was like, what the heck, I’ll apply for it. It ended up working out; I helped with a research study using VR to treat depressive symptoms in lung cancer patients.  

I learned C sharp to help run some of the simulations. The internship ended up being super fun, and kind of just reinforced that this is something I want to do. 

The DPI programs in general have been pivotal to where I am today. The research intern opportunity helped me get into City Scholars, which I did in the spring of 2022.  

The company I interned with during City Scholars had a little bit of AWS through their database stuff. I was able to talk about that in the AWS interview, which I assume helped me get an internship with AWS in the summer of 2022, which led to the full-time role I have now. 

What non-tech skill has helped you the most in your career?  

There are a couple: 

My classes, specifically ECE 391 — everyone’s favorite class — taught me different troubleshooting skills and never giving up. We could spend 40 hours trying to debug a problem and it still wouldn’t work. That unwillingness to give up has really helped me, when I’m building something out in AWS and my lambda function keeps getting permission denied, and I keep adding permissions to it, and it still doesn’t work. Honestly, anything I do is not as bad as ECE 391!  

For my job specifically, communication and presentation skills are incredibly important. You can be the smartest person and know AWS the best out of anyone, but if you can’t communicate that, then your customers aren’t going to understand. 

I was the type of person in high school who would get super nervous not only speaking in front of the class but even raising my hand and answering a question — even if I knew I was right. I remember in civics class I had this speech; I’d memorized it. I was so confident, I literally could’ve recited it in my sleep. I got up in front of the class and forgot the entire thing.  

 Fast forward to last year, when I presented an AI and data strategy doc that I had put together to VPs and directors of my customer in person. I was nervous going into it, but I presented well, they loved it, and I still get positive feedback months later.  

Has AI changed your work in the last couple of years, and if so, how?  

I like to compare AI to the movie Hidden Figures, where the original people-computers were repurposed to maintain the computing machines. It shouldn’t replace their jobs; it should theoretically make their work easier and then you just kind of change the role to meet the new technology.   

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what AI can and cannot do. A lot of companies are seeing that, where they just lay off an entire team, replace it with AI, and then they’re like, oh no, this isn’t gonna work. We saw that with Klarna; they laid off all their people and now they’re rehiring because the AI didn’t work.  

I find it super helpful when it saves me time on stuff that isn’t even my main role and otherwise takes me forever. But I don’t like to have it 1. Replace people or 2. Replace my main work. I’ve seen so many errors — and bad errors, too. So I use it to augment my work. 

For example, I hate writing emails. I’ll tell everyone who will listen. Mentally, it’s a lot less pressure for me to write whatever brain dump and then give it to Kiro, one of our AI agentic coding services, to rewrite it. It makes me a lot faster, where I could take an hour or two to write an email, and now I take like 15 minutes.   

At the end of last year, I started using the coding assistant capabilities. I was presenting at AWS re: Invent, which is our biggest conference every year, and was working on a demo as part of our session. I gave Kiro the parameters for our architecture, and I just had it run with it, and it actually created a pretty sick demo. So I started to use it a little bit more on the agentic coding side. But the bulk of my work, I’d say I do myself.  

Can you speak to your experience as a woman in tech?  

I felt it a bit more in school, where the ECE department specifically has kind of an abysmal ratio of women to men. AWS actually does a really great job of making that ratio a little bit better. When I went through training, we had 22, maybe 24 people who went through my specific training program in my cohort. Almost half of us were women. We formed a really close core group of women, and we’re still friends.  

I think AWS specifically did a really great job with that diversity — not just in gender or race, but also in educational experiences, where some of us just had a bachelor’s, some of us had a master’s. We took people from community college who just had an associate’s. And even people who had come from industry, had a few years of experience in the industry. It was honestly super refreshing to see a big tech company having that diversity of experiences, and just diversity in general. It was great for the work culture to have that mix, where it wasn’t just all White men and me.  

The space industry — especially the space tech industry — is not very diverse. So far, I haven’t really felt any type of discrimination, which is nice. There are some exceptions, but that’s honestly very rare. AWS has done a pretty great job at diversity, and people tend to be respectful.