I clicked through hoping to see a piece on the female engineers who work on Alexa, but it was an executive profile. You are right that executive profiles generally overstate the contributions of their subject.
This article overstates Toni's role. Though she does own a good portion of the Alexa ecosystem, there were/are several other directors/VPs that ran/run different portions of the system.
I am not saying that Toni's contributions are negligible, rather that her and her team are part of a bigger organization that built and improves Alexa.
Alexa was named after the Great Library at Alexandria. It is also helpful that Amazon owns alexa.com and that "Alexa" is a uniquely pronounced word with few rhyming words or semi-homophones making it a great wake word candidate.
Haha, no. I get the impression from his post history that he works for an ASR/NLU team. They tend to have a more reasonable workload than some of the other teams.
Even in Alexa there are some teams that are being pushed too hard. I work for Alexa as well and there is plenty of burn out and "sweatshop" teams in our org. It really varies a lot from team to team and what that team's role is.