CRN breaks down 10 major new hires and executive departures at AWS in recent months, which includes many AI executives.

Amazon Web Services is snatching up major artificial intelligence talent including CEOs from AI startups along with executives who’ve worked for the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft and Google Cloud.

However, AWS has also recently witnessed the departure of some serious executive talent including distinguished engineers and AI leaders as well as its global head of startup ecosystems leaving for Nvidia.

As the AI wars continue in 2024, CRN breaks down five major new hires for AWS and five executive exits that you should know about.

AWS’ $26 Billion Q2 2024 Results

Before jumping into some of the biggest AWS employee hires and departures in recent months, let’s take a look at Amazon’s most recent earnings results.

In the second quarter of 2024, AWS generated $26.3 billion in revenue, representing a 19 percent sales increase year over year. AWS now has a record annual run rate of over $105 billion. Parent company Amazon generated $148 billion in total sales during the second quarter, an increase of 10 percent year over year.

As of Q2 2024, AWS is the world’s market share leader in cloud computing infrastructure services by capturing 32 percent global share, followed by Microsoft at 23 percent share and Google at 12 precent share.

Here are the 10 new hires and executive departures at AWS over the past several months.

New Hire

David Luan

Former Position: CEO of Adept

David Luan, the CEO and co-founder of AI startup Adept, is joining the AWS artificial intelligence team.

Luan will oversee Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence Autonomy division and report to Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist for Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence business unit.

San Francisco-based Adept was founded in 2022 by several former OpenAI and top Google engineers. The startup was backed by Microsoft and Nvidia with a valuation of over $1 billion last year. The startup is a player in the AI agents space.

Prior to founding Adept, Luan was the former vice president of engineering of OpenAI.

Departure

Bratin Saha

Former AWS Position: VP and GM, AI and Machine Learning

Years At AWS: 6 Years

New Position: Chief product and technology officer at DigitalOcean

After six years of helping develop and drive AWS AI strategy, Bratin Saha left the company in June to become DigitalOcean’s new chief product and technology officer.

Saha spent the past six years at AWS as vice president and general manager for AI and machine learning and data infrastructure. He has also held executive positions at Nvidia and Intel.

While at AWS, Saha led the creation of one of the fastest-growing AWS businesses and helped to build the multibillion-dollar generative AI business for AWS through products like Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Q, Amazon Bedrock, Vision and Language AI, and applied AI services like HealthAI, Industrial AI and others.

“DigitalOcean has a strong developer following and is well poised for path-breaking innovation,” said Saha in a recent LinkedIn post. “By applying the latest breakthroughs such as generative AI, we will provide the simplest, most cost-effective, and most productive platform for developers and growing technology businesses.”

New Hire

Peter Chen

Former Position: CEO and co-founder of Covariant

Amazon nabbed Peter Chen, CEO and co-founder of AI robotics automation company Covariant.

Covariant developed artificial intelligence for advanced warehouse robotics systems. Amazon’s AI and AWS infrastructure powers thousands of mobile robots, robotics arms, and other automation systems in its operations.

Chen will join Amazon’s Robotics Team to help drive the development and implementation of Covariant’s technology within Amazon’s operations and continue to develop innovative AI solutions.

Prior to founding Covariant in 2017, Chen was a research scientist developing generative AI models at OpenAI.

Departure

Bill Vass

Former AWS Position: VP of Engineering

Years At AWS: 9 Years

New Position: CTO at Booz Allen Hamilton

Bill Vass was vice president of engineering at AWS for nearly a decade after first being hired in 2014. He led dozens of AWS services teams working on storage, messaging, monitoring, HPC, IoT, autonomous systems and robotics. Some of the key products he helped develop included CloudWatch, Storage Gateway, Snowball, CloudFormation and Quantum Computing.

Prior to AWS, Vass was president and CEO of Liquid Robotics. He is also a former president of Sun Microsystems.

Vass left AWS recently to become the chief technology officer at consulting firm giant Booz Allen Hamilton.

New Hire

Baskar Sridharan

Former Position: VP of engineering, Google Cloud

AWS hired Google Cloud all-star Baskar Sridharan as the company’s new vice president of artificial intelligence and machine learning services and infrastructure.

Sridharan now plays a critical role in leading AWS’ AI and generative AI strategy, including for Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock, core data services and ML infrastructure for developing deep learning frameworks and engines.

Sridharan spent over five years at Google Cloud most recently as vice president of engineering for the Google Cloud Platform, where he managed the engineering team for Google Compute Infrastructure as well as several product management teams within Google Cloud.

Prior to Google, Sridharan was a top engineering leader at Microsoft.

Departure

James Gosling

Former AWS Position: Distinguished Engineer

Years At AWS: 7 Years

New Position: Unknown

James Gosling was a distinguished engineer at AWS with a focus on IoT projects. One of the largest initiatives he was involved with at Amazon was develop and launch AWS Greengrass, the cloud company’s open-source edge solution.

Prior to AWS, Gosling had a long career as a chief software architect and engineering, working for the likes of Liquid Robotics, Google and a 26-year stint at Sun Microsystems.

“After a crazy number of years as a software engineer, it’s time for me to just have fun,” Gosling recently said on a LinkedIn post, which received over 1,300 comments. “I’ve got a long list of side projects to plough through.”

New Hire

Paula Bellizia

Former Position: President, Global Payments at Ebanx

Paula Bellizia is the new vice president of AWS Latin America (LATAM), which includes South America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean islands.

Bellizia has executive sales and marketing experience at Google and Microsoft. She has held roles such as vice president of market for Latin America at Google, as well as vice president of sales, marketing and operations for Microsoft in Latin America.

“Excited to start my journey at Amazon Web Services, leading the LATAM business together with the team!” she said in a recent Linked post. “Looking forward to learning, collaborating, innovating with customers, partners and people across the region.”

Prior to joining AWS in August, Bellizia was president of global payments at Ebanx.

Departure

Howard Wright

Former AWS Position: VP, global head of startups

Years At AWS: 2 Years

New Position: VP Of Startup Ecosystem at Nvidia

The startup ecosystem has never been hotter as the largest tech companies in the world are courting startups like never before in order to count the next biggest startup as a customer—particularly AI startups.

This is why Howard Wright, AWS former vice president and global head of startups, departure is important. From Nvidia to Amazon, the largest tech giants are fighting to win over the most innovative AI startups in the world with hopes they become the next great company in AI.

After just over two years at AWS, Wright has jumped ship to AI superstar Nvidia as vice president of the company’s startup ecosystem.

Prior to AWS, Wright was CEO and president of C360 Technologies. His IT career includes top executive positions at Qualcomm and Intel.

New Hire

Erich Elsen

Former Position: Co-founder of Adept

AWS hired AI startup Adept co-founder Erich Elsen who will join the company’s Artificial General Intelligence business unit. He will join fellow Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan as a new AI hire from Amazon. On LinkedIn, Elsen said his official position at Amazon is a distinguished scientist.

Prior to co-founding Adept in 2022, Elsen was a researcher at AI company DeepMind for three years as well as a software engineer at Google for two years.

Departure

Conor McNamara

Former AWS Position: VP, Managing Director

Years At AWS: 10 Years

New Position: CRO of Stripe

After a decade, Conor McNamara left AWS as its vice president and managing director of AWS in the Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN) region. He worked with customers and partners across Southeast Asia to help them scale and transform their business with the AWS cloud.

“I feel amazingly privileged to have had the opportunity to lead teams across Asia Pacific,” said McNamara in a recent LinkedIn post. “As I reflect on the growth I’ve witnessed during my tenure (approximately 25X [increase] from $4BN to $100BN ARR today) what’s most exciting is that the opportunity ahead of AWS is arguably bigger now than any time since its formation in 2006. It’s impossible to succinctly define what makes AWS so unique, but for me, a high (and ever rising) hiring bar, an ambitious vision, and space for teams to build close to customers is a powerful recipe.”

In July, McNamara become the chief revenue officer for EMEA at fintech company Stripe.