Jeff Bezos named Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy as his successor for when he steps down later this year, which leaves a vacant role atop the $40 billion market-leading cloud business responsible for more than 60% of Amazon's revenue.
While Amazon's chief financial officer on Tuesday said the company hadn't yet selected Jassy's replacement, there are a few execs who have made their mark on the cloud business and already have a seat on Amazon's overall leadership team.
Three top AWS executives — infrastructure boss Peter DeSantis, sales and marketing chief Matt Garman, and head of utility computing services Charlie Bell — sit on Amazon's "S-team," a group of about two dozen leaders from across the company who work closely together on key business decisions.
Meanwhile, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels is another prospective candidate for the CEO position. Though he doesn't serve on the S-team, which may make him a less likely replacement, he has long acted as one of the public faces of the company's cloud business and technical infrastructure.
These names are among the 95 top executives who have helped Jassy run AWS, according to an internal organizational chart obtained by Insider.
While Amazon could end up choosing a new AWS leader from outside the company, here are four top internal contenders:
Charlie Bell, senior vice president of utility computing services
Bell, who's been at Amazon since 1998, is one of the most senior executives at the company.
He was responsible for the early development of AWS's infrastructure team, leading a group of engineers across data centers, networks, and servers. He's one of the few S-team members from AWS.
Peter DeSantis, senior vice president of global infrastructure and customer support
DeSantis — who recently joined Amazon's S-team— runs all of AWS's core infrastructure business.
He was one of the first employees of AWS and played a critical role building up its technology from its early days. Amazon recently promoted DeSantis from vice president to senior vice president.
Matt Garman, vice president of AWS sales and marketing
Garman has worked at Amazon almost as long as Jassy. He started in 1998 and was promoted to vice president of sales and marketing in January 2020. He's also one of the few AWS executives on Amazon's S-team.
Before Garman was put in charge of AWS's sales and marketing, he spent seven years running its compute-services team. And before that, he was part of the core Elastic Compute Cloud server team.
Werner Vogels, Amazon chief technology officer
Vogels is the chief technology officer of Amazon overall, but he has an important role within AWS.
He joined Amazon in 2004 and has since helped grow the company's cloud business from an application programming interface for its product-catalog software to an industry leader.
Vogels, unlike the other executives on this list, is not on Amazon's S-team leadership team and appears to have few direct reports, according to an org chart reviewed by Insider.