I've spent the better part of a decade making the same joke: I'll take a job at Amazon, but only at L9. That sounds insane, so let me explain; in Amazon's taxonomy, it's the one level that doesn't exist. Amazon's leveling system famously skips from L8 (Senior Principal / Director) straight to L10 (VP / Distinguished Engineer), leaving a gap in the org chart like a missing tooth nobody talks about at Thanksgiving.
My company (yes, Duckbill)'s corporate entity is literally called "L9 Labs." I have claimed this title the way one claims an uninhabited island: by planting a flag and daring anyone to dispute it.
So imagine my surprise when a screenshot surfaced on Reddit showing Amazon's internal phone tool with one Christopher Hemsworth listed as an L9.
An L9.
The level that doesn't exist. The level I have built an identity around being the sole claimant to. And they gave it to Thor.
The Phone Tool Entry, in All Its Glory
For the uninitiated, Amazon's phone tool is the internal employee directory. Every Amazonian has a profile: name, title, level, manager, org, hire date. It's the system you use to figure out who someone is before a meeting, or to confirm that your skip-level's skip-level is, in fact, a real person and not a shared hallucination.
Chris Hemsworth's phone tool entry reads like someone was handed a form, told every field was mandatory, and decided to have the best day of their career:
Title: Chief Heartthrob, Alexa Devices (7128)
Let that wash over you. Chief Heartthrob. This is an official title in a system that also contains "Senior Principal Engineer" and "Tax Compliance Analyst III." Somewhere in Amazon's job family taxonomy, between "Chief Economist" and "Chief Information Security Officer," there is now "Chief Heartthrob." I want to see the job description. I want to see the leveling rubric. I want to know what the promotion criteria are.
Login: hemsy
Email: [email protected]
They gave him an email alias. "hemsy." Not chris.hemsworth, not c-hemsworth, not the usual firstname-lastinitial collision resolution that every Amazon employee with a common name endures. Just "hemsy." Like he's been there for twenty years and everybody knows him by one name, like Pelé, or Beyoncé, or that one guy in every engineering org who goes by his IRC handle from 2003.
Employee ID: 999999
Subtle. The man got the max integer. In a company with 1.5 million employees, Chris Hemsworth is employee number 999,999. I have questions about what happens to whoever is employee 1,000,000.
Location: LAX3-Data Center (Los Angeles)
They put him in a data center. Not an office. Not a studio. A data center. Chris Hemsworth's official Amazon location is a cage full of servers in Los Angeles. I choose to believe he is, right now, racking and stacking the hardware underpinning EC2 instances in between takes.
Hire Date: Thursday, February 5th, 2026
Today. His hire date is today. Welcome to Day 1, Chris. Literally.
Manager: Andy Jassy (ajassy)
He reports directly to the CEO. Let me run that by you again: he's L9 IC who reports to the CEO. In a normal Amazon org chart, an L9 doesn't exist, so there's no precedent for who they'd report to. Apparently the answer is "the guy who runs the whole company." This either means Hemsworth's role is so important it requires CEO oversight, or that nobody else wanted to deal with the paperwork.
Level: 9 (IC)
IC. Individual contributor. Not a manager. Chris Hemsworth, who has an entire film production apparatus mobilized around him across multiple Amazon business units, who is the public face of their most expensive ad campaign of the year, is classified as an individual contributor. He is, in Amazon's system, the same category as a software engineer who writes code and attends standup. Honestly, I can't blame him any. I don't think I'd do a very good job of mananging people inside of an Amazonian context, either.
Bar Raiser: Yes
For those outside the Amazon ecosystem: a Bar Raiser is an employee specifically trained to maintain hiring standards during interviews. They have veto power over candidates. Chris Hemsworth — a man who has never, to my knowledge, conducted a behavioral interview or written STAR-format feedback — is apparently qualified to decide whether you get hired at Amazon. "Tell me about a time you showed Bias for Action." "Well, I once fought Thanos." "That demonstrates ownership. Strong hire."
Status Message: "Alright Alexa. I disagree and commit."
"Disagree and commit" is Amazon's Leadership Principle #13 — Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. It means you can argue against a decision, but once it's made, you commit fully. The fact that Hemsworth's status message frames this as a conversation with Alexa suggests either that he's accepted the AI overlord's superior judgment, or that this is a cry for help.
Share Your Passion: "Obsessively thinking about Ad Meter votes. Campaigning for votes. Refreshing the Ad Meter page. Pretty much doing whatever it takes."
The "Share Your Passion" section is where Amazon employees list hobbies. Rock climbing. Woodworking. Competitive Overwatch. Chris Hemsworth's passion is winning the USA Today Ad Meter poll for the Super Bowl. This man has a net worth north of $130 million and his listed hobby is refreshing a newspaper's website to see if people liked his commercial. This is either a masterclass in method acting as an Amazon employee, or a genuine window into the soul of someone who has been fully absorbed by the corporate machinery.
The Hemsworth-Amazon Complex
To understand why someone went to this much trouble, you need to understand that Chris Hemsworth's relationship with Amazon goes way beyond a single Super Bowl spot. The man is embedded in the company like a load-bearing dependency you can't refactor out.
The Alexa+ Super Bowl Commercial — Airing during the third quarter of Super Bowl LX on February 8th, Hemsworth and his wife Elsa Pataky star in an ad where he becomes convinced that Alexa+, Amazon's generative-AI-powered assistant, is actively trying to murder him. Garage door decapitation, pool cover drowning, bear attack via package delivery, fireplace explosion. Y'know, it's like someone's job in an Amazon distribution center followed them home. It ends with Alexa booking him a massage with a cinnamon scrub, which is either good customer service or the AI lulling him into a false sense of security before the next attempt.
Crime 101 — An Amazon MGM Studios heist thriller hitting theaters February 13th. Amazon won a bidding war against Netflix for the rights. Early reactions are calling it "the first great movie of 2026," which feels like a low bar given we're six weeks into the year, and the competition so far is "Melania."
Subversion — Yet another Amazon MGM Studios project, a submarine action film. Because when you've already sold your identity to one megacorp, why not go full method?
At some point you stop being "talent with a deal" and start being "a division."
The L9 Problem
Here's where it gets personally offensive.
Amazon's leveling system, for the unfamiliar:
- L4-L6: Individual contributors. Does the work.
- L7: Principal / Senior Manager. Shapes the work.
- L8: Senior Principal / Director. Defines what work means.
- L9: Does not exist. Or didn't. It's the liminal space in which I live rent free.
- L10: VP / Distinguished Engineer. Answers to Andy Jassy.
- L11: SVP. Answers to no one and God, in that order.
The company famously skips L9. This is reportedly either because Bezos wanted room for future scaling that never materialized, or because they wanted to emphasize the chasm between Director and VP, depending on which Blind post you believe. The level was empty. Unused. Mine.
And now Chris Hemsworth, Chief Heartthrob, Individual Contributor, Bar Raiser, direct report to the CEO, employee number 999,999, whose official work location is a data center in Los Angeles, occupies it.
What This Actually Tells Us
Look, I'm not actually mad that Chris Hemsworth is an L9 at Amazon. (I'm a little mad.) What gets me is what this phone tool entry reveals about Amazon's internal culture.
Someone built this. Not as a press release or a marketing asset. This is an internal tool. The audience for this joke is other Amazon employees. Someone sat down, thought about what it would mean for Chris Hemsworth to have a phone tool profile, and filled in every field with the kind of dry, insider-reference-laden humor that you only develop after years of writing STAR-format interview feedback and reading six-page memos about Q3 operational metrics.
The "Bar Raiser: Yes" is what gets me. That's not a joke for the public. That's a joke for the people who have sat through Bar Raiser training, who have spent their Fridays doing phone screens, who know exactly what it means and why it's funny that Thor has it. That's an Amazon employee making Amazon employees laugh. Seriously, whoever did this: you are my kind of person. We should hang out; the audience for our type of humor really isn't that big, so make friends where we can find them.
Amazon is a company that has a level for everything. 347 services. 16 Leadership Principles, which is 14 more than most religions. A system for categorizing the categorization systems. And when confronted with "famous Australian actor doing three simultaneous deals with us," some unsung genius humorist working thanklessly within the system produced this. A fully realized character sheet for a man whose listed passion is refreshing the USA Today Ad Meter.
This is, somehow, the most amazingly Amazon thing I've ever heard.
I have been making the L9 joke for years. I named my company after it. And now I have to share it with a man who can probably benchpress my career.
If Amazon is handing out L9 titles to talent deals, I want mine. I have been providing significantly more coverage of AWS than Chris Hemsworth has. I have been doing this for over a decade. I have personally found more billing errors than most of their support engineers. I am asking for the recognition I deserve, at a level that was, until today, mine alone.
Hemsworth can keep the Super Bowl ad. I just want the badge.
