Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland
I build engineering organizations, the leaders who run them, and the platforms that help other teams succeed. In 19 years of engineering leadership - 14 of them at AWS and Amazon - I've led organizations of up to 80 engineers and engineering leaders across three layers of management, and grown multiple Principal Engineers and Senior Software Development Managers from within my teams. Before Amazon: a 40-person group at Continental Automotive and a small software firm of my own. Platform primitives have been my through-line, most of them serving Developer Experience. Much of what my teams build is invisible to end users but powers the engineers - and increasingly the AI agents - who serve them, along two long arcs: development environments, from the internal Cloud Desktop used by tens of thousands of Amazon engineers to the Development Environments service behind AWS CloudShell and Salesforce CodeBuilder, evolved early for AI agents as first-class users and surfacing externally through Amazon Q Developer, Kiro and AWS Transform; and scheduling, from Amazon's de facto internal job scheduler to the platform behind scheduled Lambda and CloudWatch Events, with a vision that later shipped as Amazon EventBridge Scheduler. The rest ships directly to AWS customers - most recently Aurora's express configuration, taking database creation from minutes to seconds via a streamlined API. A constant throughout: small teams, outsized delivery. Beyond delivery, I raise the bar on the organizations I lead and make the hard calls even when they cost me: throughout my career I have repeatedly built and restructured teams - across sites, countries and time zones - around clearer ownership, stronger technical leadership and better business alignment. Outside Amazon, I founded an environmental NGO driving the designation of a new Natural Park near Iași, and keep a lasting connection to academia: two MSc courses created and taught with industry engineers, now part of the curriculum, and co-authorship of the park's 186-page scientific foundation study, endorsed by the Romanian Academy. I also hold two patents.
Own the Developer and Agentic Experience for Aurora and RDS databases - the Create, Delete and Reboot workflows, Blue/Green deployments, and the RDS Console. • Launched Aurora's express configuration (GA March 2026) within six months of taking over the org: a new create API and streamlined experience taking database creation from minutes to seconds, including integrations with Vercel Marketplace and v0 by Vercel, where AI agents provision Aurora databases as they build applications. Key enabler: rearchitecting the creation path • Built the delivery engine behind the launch: new team mechanisms and processes, talent growth and performance management, in close partnership with Senior Principal Engineers, product managers and Directors.
Built and owned Managed Dev Environments (MDE), the internal platform service for on-demand development environments - for human engineers and, from early on, for AI agents as first-class users. • Evolved the internal Cloud Desktop concept into a new, more flexible primitive: a brand-new dev environment per task - personalized, project-configured, ready to code in seconds - factored into experiences such as AWS CloudShell, Amazon CodeCatalyst Dev Environments and Salesforce CodeBuilder. • The platform has since become a foundation of Amazon's agentic development, providing code-execution sandboxes for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore-hosted agents and surfacing externally through Amazon Q Developer, Kiro and AWS Transform. • Grew the org and its leaders: promoted a Principal Engineer and two Senior SDMs (managers of managers reporting to me), talented leaders who owned major parts of the platform - including the development environments behind AWS Cloud9. Built two new sites from zero, Amsterdam and Berlin, while leading remotely from Romania. • Also managed part of the team building Amazon Q capabilities in the AWS Console.
Owned an emerging portfolio making Amazon engineers more productive in their individual workflows: two two-pizza teams, in close collaboration with product managers, consistently outdelivering their size. • Scaled the internal Cloud Desktop from a couple of thousand users to tens of thousands - 1-click setup, security upgrades and fleet management - making it the de facto development machine for Amazon engineers. • Wrote the PR/FAQ for and launched Rapid Dev Environment: personal staging environments bridging Amazon's classic internal build systems to native AWS, paving the way for later personal-staging solutions. • Launched BuilderHub, the internal portal centralizing documentation and development environment management, which later became the entry point for starting new projects at Amazon (also owned the legacy "new project" experience it replaced).
Founded the NGO working to protect the old-growth forests around Iași - the second largest metropolitan area in Romania - through environmental education and a science-based push for formal protection. Leading the initiative to designate the Codrii Iașilor Natural Park: co-authored the 186-page scientific foundation study, endorsed by the Romanian Academy. Tens of campaigns, hundreds of media appearances including a weekly radio feature, and events totaling thousands of participants - from guided tours for rural schoolchildren to trail races with 600+ registered runners.
Board member of one of Romania's largest NGO networks for urban and peri-urban protected areas, where Codrii Iașilor is a founding member. Contributing to decision-making, coordination and expertise in forestry, environmental legislation and communication.
Legal representative for the Amazon Data Services Romania SRL entity - contracts, financial reports and statutory accountability. Minimal overhead.
Informal leadership of the Amazon Iași Development Center: represented the site with national and local authorities - including the US Ambassador to Romania, the IT&C Minister and the Mayor of Iași - and coordinated the site's Amazon business leaders on recruiting, branding and university relationships. Deliberately transitioned the site from a centralized GM model to distributed leadership, then handed off the role.
Took Amazon's distributed job scheduler from early beta to critical company-wide platform. • Led the team that built the new internal distributed cron solution and fully replaced and deprecated the legacy company-wide scheduler in two years - half the projected timeline - starting from a team of three. • The service became Amazon's de facto job scheduler, used by thousands of teams across Retail, Digital, AWS and Corporate, part of the AWS region build - and still in broad use more than a decade later.