George Holt
Product and Engineering Leader
Building Developer Tools, Engineering Systems, and AI Coding Assistants
I build high-trust teams, set clear technical direction, and deliver experiences developers love and adopt. I'm exploring senior leadership roles at the intersection of engineering and product.
- Org scale: Managed managers (4 SDMs); multi-team planning and execution.
- Launches: Shipped CodeWhisperer / Amazon Q in IDEs.
- Cross-discipline experience: Manager of Managers (3 yrs), Engineering Manager (10), Product (7), Software Engineer (3), SDET (3).
- Cross-company model: Enabled multiple service teams to contribute reliably to shared toolkits.
- Engineering systems: delivered productivity gains and cost savings in multiple companies.
- Culture: High-trust, high-accountability teams; predictable delivery, sustainable pace - yet capable of delivering in high-pressure situations.
- Public speaking & thought leadership: A speaker at major industry events including 2019 AWS New York Summit (18,000+ attendees) and 2011 Microsoft Build.
Mentoring and coaching are among the most rewarding parts of my work. If you are a software engineer or engineering manager looking to sharpen your impact I would be glad to help.
About Me
I'm an engineering leader with more than 25 years of experience at companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and Snowflake, where I've built high-performing teams and delivered developer platforms at scale. My work includes AWS's IDE extensions; launching CodeWhisperer and Amazon Q; driving 17x adoption growth for AWS IDE Toolkits; saving millions annually through build system strategy at Snowflake; and contributing to five major Windows releases (XP-10).
Throughout my career, I've gravitated toward challenges that require fixing what's broken, scaling what works, and building healthy organizations around both. From being the second leadership hire on a new Microsoft team that grew to 60 people, to leading multi-team organizations at Amazon and Microsoft, I've gained a unique perspective on growing teams and products responsibly — with a focus not only on outcomes, but on how those outcomes are achieved.
I focus on:
- Building cultures of trust and accountability, where engineers feel safe to take risks and share ideas, but also know performance standards are clear and consistent.
- Coaching engineers and managers into leadership roles and developing a pipeline of future leaders.
- Driving cultural transformations — shifting teams from reactive firefighting and burnout toward proactive, sustainable engineering practices.