AWS Hires Two Vice Presidents To Drive Agentic AI For Agentcore And Kiro

As AWS accelerates its agentic AI strategy, the $124 billion cloud giant has hired two top-notch engineers—including a former AWS general manager—to drive its Amazon AgentCore and AWS Kiro businesses.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman told CRN earlier this year that his top priority is accelerating agentic and generative AI customer success.

While Garman has made big strides on the AI innovation front, he now has hired two engineering innovators as new vice presidents to help drive the $124 billion company’s agentic AI business, specifically around AgentCore and AWS Kiro.

The Seatle-based company hired former AWS executive David Richardson as its new vice president of Amazon AgentCore, which is AWS’ new set of services for deploying and operating AI agents securely at enterprise scale.

Richardson (on the right in above photo) spent 16 years at AWS with his last role in 2022 being vice president of AWS Serverless, where he played a key role in building AWS Serverless business.

He spent six years as AWS vice president and general manager of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), which provides network storage for AWS EC2. Richardson also helped engineer AWS solutions like CloudFront and AWS global DNS service during his 16-year tenure before departing in 2022 to lead development at payment processing firm Stripe.

Richardson will now oversee AWS’ AgentCore business as well as related products including Agent Builder within Bedrock, according to a report by Business Insider.

AgentCore helps developers bridge the gap between proof of concept and production for AI agents by delivering a set of solutions that allow customers to move agents from prototypes to applications that can scale to millions of end-users.

AWS Hires Trifacta Founder, Berkeley Professor To Boost Kiro

Another big AWS hire on the agentic AI front is Joe Hellerstein, a current professor at the University of California, Berkeley and renowned researcher.

Hellerstein (on left in above photo) was the co-founder of AI software development firm RunLLM, as well as the former founder and chief strategy officer for Trifacta, a software and data management company.

At AWS, Hellerstein will be tasked with boosting AWS’ new Kiro developer coding offering.

Kiro is a new agentic IDE (integrated development environment) program that helps customers deliver code from concept to production through a simplified developer experience for working with AI agents. An IDE is a software application that helps programmers develop software code efficiently.

Hellerstein is now an AWS vice president and distinguished scientist, according to Business Insider.

Hellerstein is a former technical advisor for a slew of tech companies including: Across AI, Acryl Data, Brim Data, Captricity, Datometry, SurveyMonkey, Platfora, Truviso, Vitesse Data, and Visual Layer.

Recent AWS AI Executive Departures

This year, AWS lost one of its top generative AI leaders in Vasi Philomin.

Philomin was vice president and general manager for AWS machine learning and AI business, responsible for building and scaling generative AI applications, including the company’s flagship GenAI platform, Amazon Bedrock. He has since joined Siemens as executive vice president of data and AI.

AWS also recently lost Krishna Srinivasan Iyer, who was head of engineering for AWS’ Amazon Q applications.

Amazon Q is AWS’ flagship generative AI assistant that became generally available in 2024. In July, Iyer joined BNSF Railway as its new head of software engineering.

AWS generated $30.9 billion in total revenue during the second quarter of 2025, an increase of 17 percent year over year.