Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Microsoft's former Copilot CTO takes a hands-on engineering job on Amazon's AI agents
Amazon hired Pedram Rezaei, Microsoft's former Copilot CTO and a 20-year veteran there, as a distinguished engineer on its Quick and Kiro agent products. Amazon's memo says he will keep coding daily. Other employers hiring senior agent builders will be measured against that arrangement.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
Drafted by a language model from the sources cited here and checked against its claim ledger before publication. How we use AISend a correction
What happened
- Amazon's agentic AI chief Swami Sivasubramanian wrote that Quick's monthly AI users grew fourfold from Q1 to Q2, while Kiro's user count doubled.
- The same memo said Marvin Theimer and Reto Kramer have returned to Amazon to work on neurosymbolic AI and automated reasoning, one of its biggest bets by the memo's account.
- At Microsoft, Office boss Ryan Roslansky, one of three executives on the new Copilot leadership team, said he will leave at the end of the year.
- Business Insider reports that rival agent products, including OpenAI's Dots, Meta's Muse and Instinct, are gaining traction.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure Some of Copilot's technical know-how now sits inside a direct rival's agent group, in the same year Microsoft is replacing the executives who lead Copilot.
- constraint Amazon gave the growth only as multiples. Candidates weighing an offer, and rivals sizing the threat, can judge Quick's and Kiro's momentum from the memo but not their scale.
- precedent Amazon staffed its agent and reasoning bets in one memo with a rival's engineer and two returning veterans. Anyone else hiring senior AI builders competes with offers from rivals and with the pull of former employers.
Swami Sivasubramanian's memo describes the hire as an engineering hire. "He is a hands-on engineer who is still in the code every day, and he plans to keep it that way here," he wrote [9]. According to the memo, Rezaei's plan for his first few months is to "meet people, learn how things work here, and ship something real" [10].
That framing matters to anyone hiring for agent products. I think the scarcest candidate in this market is the senior technical leader who still wants to write code, and Amazon's memo makes that preference part of the hire.
One hire is not a fight over talent. Business Insider's report shows Amazon adding senior technical people [2] while Microsoft loses them, as Satya Nadella shakes up its leadership to speed up its AI strategy [12]. Peter Lee, a veteran with influence over Microsoft's AI research, announced on Wednesday that he plans to leave [13]. The report does not say where Lee or Roslansky [14] are going, and it does not report a competing offer for Rezaei. The evidence supports a narrower reading. A rival that is reorganising its AI leadership is letting senior people go, and Amazon says it is still recruiting. Rezaei, Sivasubramanian wrote, "joins at an exciting time for our organization as we continue to build out our technical leadership team to help take on the ambitious work we have planned" [8].
Amazon gets both product and research experience. Rezaei was Copilot's CTO until June, and before that he held senior technical roles on Bing and Dynamics 365 [4]. His most recent work at Microsoft was training foundation models on its Superintelligence team [3]. Amazon is starting him on two products: an AI assistant and productivity app, and an AI coding tool [5][6].
By Sivasubramanian's figures, Quick grew at twice Kiro's multiple from one quarter to the next [16]. The two numbers measure different things: monthly AI users for Quick, total users for Kiro [7]. The memo calls the pair "a major opportunity" to "transform how work gets done" [15].
For operators this quarter, one distinguished engineer does not change what senior agent builders expect to be offered. Over the next several quarters, what matters is Microsoft. If its leadership changes keep releasing people who built Copilot, I'd expect companies with senior engineering tracks to hear from them first, and Amazon has just used its track for exactly that kind of hire [2]. Amazon faces its own test sooner: whether Quick or Kiro ships something with Rezaei's work in it during his first few months [10].
What to watch
- Where Peter Lee and Ryan Roslansky go after Microsoft, and whether either joins a company building agent products.
- Whether Amazon publishes absolute user counts for Quick and Kiro, so the fourfold and twofold growth figures can be sized.
- Whether more engineers from Microsoft's Copilot organisation follow Rezaei to AWS's Agentic AI and Emerging Technologies group.