Amazon cloud senior executive steps down after 18 years

long-time manager of Amazon‘s cloud division is leaving the tech giant after nearly 19 years, the company announced Wednesday.

Dave Brown, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, will leave the company at the end of this month for a “new external role,” AWS CEO Matt Garman wrote in a memo to employees. Garman said Brown will be replaced by Dave Treadwell, Amazon’s head of e-commerce.

“Dave has been a major contributor to what we have built at AWS, and I would like to personally thank him for his contributions to helping us grow and develop our technology, business, and team,” Garman wrote.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Brown joined AWS in its early days and was part of the early team that assembled the core EC2 service in South Africa in the 2000s. EC2, one of AWS’s oldest services, rents virtual slices of physical servers that businesses use to run applications and websites, and is billed on a per-second basis.

Recently, Brown’s responsibilities have expanded to include AWS compute and machine learning services such as Bedrock and SageMaker products. He is also part of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s S-Team. This team is a highly influential group of 28 executives who report directly to Jassy and meet regularly with him to make important business decisions.

In a separate note, Brown said he felt “the time is right to begin a new chapter for me,” adding that his organization is “in excellent hands” under Treadwell.

“He is an exceptional leader with deep technical expertise, relentless customer focus, and a true passion for building strong teams,” Brown wrote.

Brown’s departure comes as AWS benefits from strong demand for artificial intelligence services, with the division posting 28% revenue growth in the first quarter. cloud rivals microsoft and google It is also riding on the surge in AI-related spending.

—CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed reporting to this article.