Who are Amazon's decision-makers?

Andy Jassy has been President & CEO since July 2021, when founder Jeff Bezos moved to Executive Chairman. Jassy is a deep Amazon insider — he joined in 1997 and built AWS from a blank page into the company's profit engine before taking the top job.

Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 after leaving the New York hedge fund D. E. Shaw, and remains the largest individual shareholder and board chair. The rest of the bench is similarly long-tenured: Matt Garman (AWS CEO since June 2024) and Werner Vogels (CTO since 2005) are career Amazonians, and CFO Brian Olsavsky has held the role since 2015 — reflecting a culture that promotes from within. In April 2026 Amazon added AWS infrastructure chief Prasad Kalyanaraman to the S-team, underscoring how central AI infrastructure has become to its leadership priorities.

Strategy and large capital allocation flow through the S-team and Jassy, but real purchasing authority is distributed to the business and engineering leaders who own each P&L. For cloud, AI, and infrastructure spend, AWS leadership (Matt Garman, infrastructure chief Prasad Kalyanaraman, and product VPs) and the CTO org set direction; for retail and logistics tooling, Worldwide Stores under Doug Herrington owns the budget.

CFO Brian Olsavsky's finance organization governs the famously rigorous, document-and-ROI-driven approval process. The practical buying committee is typically a director/VP economic buyer, an engineering or operations technical evaluator, and finance/procurement — with a strong default toward building internally, now reinforced by Jassy's AI-efficiency mandate.

Amazon runs as a federation of single-threaded teams and business units rather than one monolith — a structure Jeff Bezos institutionalized with 'two-pizza teams' and service-oriented ownership. Each major business (AWS, North America Stores, International, Advertising, Devices) operates with its own leadership and P&L under the S-team.

At roughly 1.58 million employees, this autonomy lets units move independently while the S-team and annual 'OP1/OP2' planning cycles keep capital allocation and priorities aligned across the whole company. In 2025–2026 Jassy moved to flatten management layers and cut ~30,000 corporate roles, explicitly aiming to reduce bureaucracy and reinvest in AI.