Category:Former Amazon Employees
Jeff Bezos left a senior vice-presidency at the investment firm D. E. Shaw in 1994 to start Amazon in a garage in Bellevue, Washington, and Andy Jassy joined in 1997, spent nearly two decades building Amazon Web Services out of almost nothing, and succeeded him as chief executive in July 2021. The category collects biographical entries on people who worked at Amazon or at Amazon Web Services. Its membership falls into two cohorts separated by about twenty-five years, with very little in between: the people who built the company in the late 1990s, and a group of engineers who joined in the 2020s, stayed two to four years, and left to found artificial intelligence startups.
Background
Amazon began as an online bookseller and became an e-commerce and cloud computing company. The cloud business, Amazon Web Services, is the part of it that most of the recent members of this category actually worked for, and their entries reflect its internal structure: identity management for low-code services, customer solutions management, and the supply chain and forecasting organizations.
Because the corporate entity is recorded in several forms across this wiki, membership is currently split across more than one heading, and a reader looking for a complete roster should treat this category and its adjacent ones as one set.
The founding cohort
Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986 in electrical engineering and computer science, worked on Wall Street, and founded the company in 1994. MacKenzie Scott, a Princeton graduate and novelist, had an early role in its founding, married Bezos in 1993 and divorced him in 2019, retaining a stake that funded one of the larger sustained charitable giving programs on record. David Risher joined in 1997 from Microsoft, at the point the company had just gone public and was expanding rapidly, and served as senior vice president for United States retail until 2002; he later co-founded the non-profit Worldreader and now runs Lyft.
Andy Jassy is the bridge between the two cohorts. He grew up in Scarsdale, New York, took his degrees at Harvard, joined in 1997, and built Amazon Web Services from its beginnings in the early 2000s into the business that now underpins most of the careers described below.
The engineers who left to found startups
The larger part of this roster is a recent, tightly clustered group with a common shape: a technical role at Amazon or Amazon Web Services lasting a few years, followed by a Y Combinator batch. Apoorva Mehta is the earliest of them, joining as a software engineer in Seattle after graduating and taking what he learned about logistics, inventory and fulfilment into Instacart, which he ran as chief executive from 2012 to 2021. Michael Korovkin progressed from a 2020 internship at Amazon Lab126 to software development engineer roles through 2025, is credited with leading the integration of artificial intelligence into Alexa devices, and left to co-found Mimos. Tiger Wang interned twice, in transportation logistics and consumer identity, joined full time in 2024 and left in 2025 to co-found Nessie Labs. Viraat Das worked as a machine learning engineer before founding Exla. Rohan Vasishth was an artificial intelligence engineer and told an interviewer that he did not need to stay six years to learn the business and would learn faster by doing it, which is as clean a statement of the pattern as the roster contains.
On the cloud side, Anders Lie worked on identity management for low-code services from July 2022 to August 2023 before a consultancy and then his own company; Jake Yatvitskiy interned and then worked as a software engineer at Amazon Web Services before co-founding Haystack Software; Hunter Brooks came through Capital One and Amazon Web Services, where he worked on machine learning, before founding Ellipsis; Mohamed Khalifa was a customer solutions manager helping enterprise clients before PathAI and then RadMate AI; Geoffrey Negiar worked in the Forecasting Science group inside the supply chain optimization organization before Google Brain, Bloomberg and his own forecasting company. Alix Maurin held positions at Uber and Amazon before co-founding RentFlow.
See also
This category currently contains no pages or media.