Andy Warfield is a Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services. In this role, Andy leads a global team of engineers who build some of AWS’s largest data services such as Amazon S3, which is used by millions of customers to run real-time analytics on their data and power their businesses. Over the past six years, Andy has pioneered new innovations across AWS’s cloud storage portfolio. He has led storage integrations for artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) workloads, delivered new high-performance storage services, and reshaped the hardware and infrastructure layers of AWS storage systems. Andy works closely with data-centric customers who are adopting generative AI around data strategy in place and effective tooling. In 2023, Andy and his team also launched Amazon S3 Express One Zone, the world’s fastest cloud object store for request-intensive operations like data analytics and generative AI.

Andy has over one hundred patents and research publications and his work has over 20,000 citations. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he was one of the authors of the Xen hypervisor. Xen is an open source hypervisor that was used as the initial virtualization layer in AWS, among multiple other cloud companies. Andy was a founder at Xensource, a startup based on Xen that was subsequently acquired by Citrix Systems. Following XenSource, Andy was a professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he was awarded a Canada Research Chair and a Sloan Research Fellowship. As a professor, Andy conducted systems research in areas including operating systems, networking, security, and storage. Andy’s second startup, Coho Data, was a scale-out enterprise storage array that integrated NVMe SSDs with programmable networks. Coho Data raised over 80M in funding from VCs including Andreessen Horowitz, Intel Capital, and Ignition Partners.

Andy lives in Vancouver with his wife and three children.