Amazon is doubling down on its agentic AI ambitions, hiring two senior executives to help build its growing portfolio of developer tools and infrastructure for intelligent agents.
The new hires follow Business Insider’s report in early September that Amazon was getting ready to make a big splash in the AI agent market, sparking a rally in the company’s shares. Amazon’s cloud computing arm, AWS, has made an aggressive move to position itself as a leader in agentic AI, where intelligent software agents build, deploy, and manage complex applications on behalf of users.
David Richardson returns to Amazon Web Services as vice president of AgentCore, the company’s foundational agent infrastructure offering. A 16-year veteran of the cloud giant, Richardson was instrumental in launching AWS’s Serverless business before departing in 2022 to lead developer experience and product platform at Stripe.
Now back, DRR, as he’s known inside Amazon, will oversee AgentCore along with related projects such as the Strands SDK and Agent Builder within Bedrock, AWS’s popular AI platform.
“We expect DRR to start other new exciting efforts in the AgentCore umbrella,” Swami Sivasubramanian, who runs the Agentic AI team at AWS, wrote in a recent internal memo announcing the hire.
Amazon declined to comment.
Joe Hellerstein, a professor at UC Berkeley and renowned database researcher, has also joined AWS as Vice President and Distinguished Scientist, according to a separate internal memo. He will play a pivotal role in advancing Kiro, AWS’s agentic integrated development environment (IDE). Kiro has quickly gained traction, attracting over 100,000 users in its first week of release.
Hellerstein’s academic work includes leadership of the Hydro project, a framework for building distributed systems. At AWS, he will focus on integrating Hydro’s principles into Kiro to strengthen the platform’s reliability and developer appeal.
“Joe will work closely with our customers to understand their needs and translate that feedback into making both Hydro and our products more impactful,” Deepak Singh, an AWS VP who oversees developer agents and experiences, wrote in an internal memo. “We are particularly excited about the possibilities of how Hydro can integrate with Kiro to help our customers build robust, high-performance distributed systems.”
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