10 things to know about AWS’s new compute leader Dave Treadwell

Key takeaways Treadwell will lead AWS's compute and machine learning at AI inflection point. He says Amazon's writing culture and data-driven decision making won him over. He considers AI a bigger moment than computers, the internet, mobile phones, and cloud computing.

When Dave Treadwell graduated from Princeton in 1989 with a degree in electrical engineering, he didn’t know he’d soon be coding one of the most consequential computer operating systems in history. But an early opportunity to join Microsoft gave him the chance to do just that, as part of a small group of engineers working on what would become Windows.

Treadwell would stay with the company for the next 27 years, and fully expected to remain there longer, until a meeting with Amazon’s then head of stores, Jeff Wilke, changed his mind. Impressed, and intrigued by Amazon’s culture, Treadwell was driven to leave a job he loved and join the company to lead what is now the eCommerce Foundation, running Amazon.

com ’s technology platform, one of the biggest applications in the world. Now, almost a decade later, he is transitioning to lead AWS ’s Compute and Machine Learning Services team at a moment when scaling AI compute is one of the most significant challenges in technology.

We spoke to Treadwell about his path to Amazon, his decision-making framework, what customer obsession really means to him and what he does to wind down.

Here are 10 things to know about the man who still has some of his ’90s-era Windows code, interviewed Amazon as much as the company interviewed him, and likes to joke that if tech doesn’t work out, he might try making it as an EDM DJ instead. 1. He wasn’t looking for a job when Amazon came calling Treadwell had a job he liked very much and was doing well at.

He certainly wasn’t putting out any feelers to move. But in 2016, Amazon’s Jeff Wilke, someone he’d known for years, got in touch. Treadwell agreed to meet out of curiosity, suspecting (correctly), there was a “recruiting component” to the invitation. “He described this job leading e-commerce platform infrastructure.

I found it intriguing because it was about driving the future of online retail, and also an opportunity to be involved in the transition to cloud computing. At the time these were two of the biggest evolutions in tech, and they still are today." Treadwell describes the interview as mutual.

“They were evaluating me, but I was evaluating them just as carefully." AWS CEO calls AI inference a new building block that transforms what developers can build Task-accomplishing agents deliver more than just content generation, and enterprises will see massive returns in 2026, says AWS CEO Matt Garman. 2.

Amazon culture sealed the deal for him It wasn’t technology, or a title, that tipped the scale for Treadwell; it was culture. He didn’t want to spend any more mental energy “navigating internal politics” as he had in previous roles, and at Amazon, he saw something different.

He cites the company’s written culture, and focus on data and customers, as the grounding for making decisions based on the best course of action, rather than anyone’s ego or a hierarchy. “My assessment from those early interviews, right through to my reality almost 10 years later, is the culture is a perfect fit for me.

We focus on what’s best for customers, and what’s best for our business. We make decisions that way. It’s a culture I’ve really enjoyed being a part of.” 3. His first encounter with AWS was a “how the heck are they doing this?” moment Treadwell’s first brush with AWS happened long before he joined Amazon.

He would read about the company’s early products, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and marvel at how to make the numbers work. “I kept thinking to myself, how the heck are they providing compute and storage at these prices? If what they’re doing is real, it’s pretty amazing.” 4.

He knows what it takes to effectively run applications at internet scale At Amazon, Treadwell has been running one of the biggest technology estates in the world, owning all of Amazon’s eCommerce Foundation efforts and other strategic projects, such as Prime Air.

He also led site availability for Prime Day and scaled the underlying technology, making it one of the largest consumer shopping events in the world. He notes the lessons along the way. “In 2018, we learned so much about the importance of great infrastructure availability, keeping services up and running smoothly, and we've advanced tremendously since then.

Prime Day 2026 was our cleanest, smoothest event to date, and I’m really proud of how well all the teams executed to deliver for our customers.” Another journey Treadwell is proud of is solving a major problem with infrastructure cost efficiency for the Stores business.

“We spent a huge amount of time and energy working to build processes and find engineering efficiencies to bend our infrastructure cost curve. It took a while,