Werner Vogels

Werner Hans Peter Vogels is the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Amazon.com. Vogels was born in October 3, 1958 in Ermelo, Netherlands.

Education

He finished a degree in computer science at The Hague University of Applied Sciences in June 1989 and received a Ph.D. in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands in 2003. His thesis was Scalable Cluster Technologies for Mission Critical Enterprise Computing.

Career

Werner Vogels was a senior researcher at INESC in Porto, Portugal from 1991 to 1994. In 1994 until 2004, he was a research scientist at the Computer Science Department of Cornell University. He mainly conducted research in scalable reliable enterprise systems. He is the author of many conference and journal articles, mainly on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing systems.

In 1997, he co-founded iReliable Network Solutions, Inc. with Kenneth Birman and Robbert van Renesse. It possessed US patents on computer network resource monitoring and multicast protocols. From 1999 through 2002, he was its VP and CTO.

He joined Amazon in September 2004 as the director of systems research. He was named chief technology officer in January 2005 and vice president in March of that year.