AWS Hires Microsoft Teams Founder To Lead Amazon Quick Suite

AWS has hired Microsoft Teams founder and engineering innovator Jigar Thakkar to lead Amazon’s new AI-powered digital workspace Quick Suite.

AWS has hired Microsoft Teams’ founding member and longtime Microsoft innovator Jigar Thakkar as the leader of its new Amazon Quick Suite product.

The 19-year Microsoft executive was a founding member of Microsoft Teams and helped lead Skype for Business engineering as corporate vice president. Thakkar was critical to the engineering, development and rollout of Microsoft Teams in 2016.

As the new vice president of Amazon Quick Suite, Thakkar will lead AWS’ team in building out a portfolio of agentic applications and services designed for business users, Amazon told CRN in an email.

“Jigar brings over 25 years of experience driving digital transformation and engineering excellence across global financial services and major technology platforms,” said Amazon in a statement to CRN confirming his hire. “He spent nearly 20 years at Microsoft, where he was the founding engineering leader for Microsoft Teams.”

AWS’ New Hire Has Deep Microsoft Background

Thakkar joined Microsoft in 1999 and quickly became a software development lead for Microsoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.

He spent five years as a principal development manager for Windows Mobile Devices team, then spent several years in various top engineering roles, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In 2015, Thakkar became Microsoft’s engineering leader and founding member of Microsoft Teams.

On LinkedIn, Thakkar said that he “developed Microsoft Teams product and engineering team from scratch, and launched the beta within 18 months.”

“I led a team of over 400 engineers in Bellevue WA, Palo Alto CA, Bangalore India, Stockholm Sweden and Prague Czech Republic,” Thakkar said, referring to Microsoft Teams. Responsibilities included product architecture as well as the “entire engineering team [and] site reliability engineering,” he wrote.

In 2017, he was promoted to corporate vice president of Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business engineering.

He left Microsoft in 2018 to become the CTO and head of engineering for financial services giant MSCI Inc.

At MSCI, Thakkar led the technology and data functions for all product lines and enterprise operations at MSCI, overseeing a global team of approximately 4,000 technologists, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Thakkar could not be reached for comment by press time.

Amazon’s New AI-Powered Quick Suite

Thakkar will lead Amazon Quick Suite, the company’s new AI-powered digital workspace for AWS designed to help businesses and users find insights, automate tasks, and take actions across enterprise applications.

It unifies several AI capabilities into a single experience, stemming from the integration of Amazon Q Business and Amazon QuickSight.

Quick Suite launched just a few months ago in October.

However, Amazon said Quick is currently used by hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees, alongside customer wins including BMW, AstraZeneca, 3M and Principal Financial.

Amazon said Quick customer Jabil achieved $400,000 in savings by using Quick to optimize account collections and RFQ submissions. Additionally, Quick client Propulse Lab cut customer service ticket handling by 80 percent, potentially saving 24,000 agent hours annually.

Amazon is set to report the financial results from the fourth quarter of 2025 in early February.