Adrian Cockcroft

After a forty year long career at the leading edge of technology Adrian Cockcroft retired from his position at Amazon in June 2022. He is now working part time as an advisor, analyst, board member, public speaker, and investor.

Cockcroft spent 2021 and 2022 deeply immersed in the dual challenges of helping Amazon - one of the largest companies in the world - become more sustainable, and via AWS - one of the largest technology suppliers in the world - helping its enterprise and public sector customers become more sustainable. With European regulations in place, and the US following a similar path, most large organizations are confronted with new requirements to report on their ability to operate sustainably, and the physical and transition risks they face. He was an author and executive sponsor of a best practice guide for cloud computing called the Well Architected Pillar for Sustainability, published in December 2021.

There is an industry wide fascination with the success of both Netflix and Amazon, their culture and ideas, and Cockcroft has been distilling these learnings and sharing them with executives for many years. The Cloud for CEOs booklet - Measure Innovation with One Metric - provides a short summary, and a more extensive discussion is in his talk about Innovation at Speed presented at AWS re:Invent 2019.

Cockcroft is an advocate of systems thinking approaches, as described in his talk on his experiences at Netflix - Systems for Innovation - USI Paris 2015. He has been the primary keynote host presenter at 20 AWS summits, including New York, Paris, Tokyo, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, Singapore, Seoul, Bangkok, Shenzhen, with audiences in the room between 3000-9000 people, and associated press interviews and analyst meetings. He is an invited speaker to present keynotes and track sessions at industry conferences around the world, and also at private events for company offsites.

Cockcroft led the AWS engagement in Formula One executive hospitality events during 2018-2019, guiding the structure of the event as it was set up, and acting as host and opening speaker at Monza, Silverstone, Barcelona, Hockenheim, Austin and Mexico City. He was also the Green Tech track lead for the QCon San Francisco developer conference in October 2022, and is an individual member of the Green Software Foundation.

Graduating from The City University, London with a BSc in Applied Physics and Electronics, Cockcroft worked for Cambridge Consultants Ltd, Sun Microsystems UK and after moving to Sun Microsystems in the USA he was a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect for High Performance Computing.

Cockcroft helped found eBay Research Labs, joined Netflix as a Director leading a team working on personalization algorithms, and ended up as Cloud Architect for their migration to AWS and open source program. After a few years working on Sand Hill Road for Battery Ventures, he joined AWS as a VP in 2016 reporting to the CMO, and led work in open source for several years before moving to the Amazon Sustainability organization.