When Fabio Victorino started at Audible in 2003, working on our customer support team, there were only about 100 people on staff. “We used to fit the whole company into one, big room for happy hour,” Fabio recalls. If a listener called in with a problem, he could literally stand up, walk across the room, and work it out with a developer in real time, because “customer support, developers, content — we were all on the same floor.”

Today, Fabio is a Senior Director of Software Development, leading multiple teams that build and evolve critical services and experiences for Audible customers on both Audible and Amazon surfaces. He’s responsible for technical strategy and architecture across high-impact systems, but the way he talks about his job still sounds a lot like those early happy hours: close-knit teams, shared responsibility, and a deep sense of service to listeners.

After “22 plus years at Audible, I still feel excited,” he says. “I still wake up and feel good about commuting to the office,” listening to his audiobook the whole way, then “getting here and being able to make a change for not just the people I work with, but for our customers and our business.”

Fabio’s story with Audible starts long before he ever set foot in our first office in Wayne, New Jersey. He was born in Brazil and moved to the United States as a teenager. “It’s a fun fact that most people probably don't know, because I don't have an accent,” he explains. Before Audible, he was working in banking, doing customer service, even as he spent nights and weekends building PCs and teaching himself web development. “I was always very hands on, very technical,” he recalls.

When Fabio learned about Audible through an acquaintance who worked here, he was intrigued by the fact that “there’s this company in New Jersey that’s essentially pioneering the way people listen to stories and stories are told,” he says. He joined our customer service team, fielding calls about early hardware, like the Audible Otis, and helping people install and use the Audible Manager desktop app, even calling customers to follow up after their issue was resolved. “It’s all about being customer obsessed,” he says, something that's been true since our earliest days.

In the beginning, Audible’s mission was somewhat abstract to Fabio — that is, until he listened to his first audiobook, Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, a natural choice for a lifelong sci-fi fan. He was hooked. “I understood [Audible founder] Don [Katz]’s mission and vision then: that the power of the spoken word can impact lives.”

Fabio’s career journey at Audible was forged by his curiosity and enthusiasm for expanding into new areas. While working in customer support and going to school, Fabio kept asking how he could get more involved technically at Audible. “I always sought opportunities to learn more, to challenge myself,” he says. He ventured into engineering-adjacent work on small but essential tools: “One of my earlier memories is creating and maintaining these scripts that we used to send email communications for our customers,” he says. Those projects became a bridge into a full software developer role. Over time, he worked across both front-end and back-end systems and took on increasingly complex technical problems.

Then one day, Fabio’s manager approached him about an opportunity to manage a team, which was “something I wasn't even thinking about,” he recalls. “He saw the way I was executing — I was not only just a developer, but I was taking ownership, driving the project.”

Today, he leads managers and multiple teams, but he still frames his role in service terms: he’s there to remove roadblocks, foster autonomy, and keep the focus on the listener. “As a manager, I'm here to serve the members of my team,” he says. “I want them to grow in their career. I want them to be autonomous and self-independent, but I'm here to help. I'm here to unlock them.”

Along the way, Fabio had a hand in some of Audible’s most pivotal moments. The Amazon acquisition in 2008 stands out. “That really opened the doors from an opportunity standpoint,” he says, “being able to leverage [Amazon’s] cutting-edge technology to help us move faster, to help us evolve our architecture.” He was part of the early team that moved Audible from simply sending catalog data to Amazon to enabling a true end-to-end journey on Amazon.

More recently, he helped Audible bring in-app purchasing to the Amazon shopping app, especially on iOS, something customers were wanting for a long time. To do this, his teams worked with Google and Apple APIs, Amazon’s digital subscription surfaces, and the Amazon shopping app team. “This year we've launched in-app purchasing for iOS, which is a huge win for our customers and our business at Audible,” he says. “I’m super proud and excited what the team has done.”

Fabio has continued to grow at Audible by taking part in leadership and coaching courses, joining internal Gen AI workshops, and tapping into the knowledge of the people around him. “It's a continuous learning experience,” he says.

He laughs when asked what his twentysomething self, fresh out of banking, would have thought if someone told him he’d end up here. “I never thought I would be leading 50-plus people, software development engineers, to build all this cool stuff at Audible that impacts our customers,” he says.

If he could go back to his first day at Audible, what would he tell his younger self? “Don't fear failure,” says Fabio. “Fearing failure slows down innovation. And if you're going to fail, fail fast; you can fall, get right back up and try new things.”

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