George Holt

Engineering Leader with Product Ownership Experience in Developer Tools

I'm an engineering leader with 25+ years at Amazon, Microsoft, and Snowflake, where I've built and scaled high-performing teams that deliver at scale. My work includes AWS's IDE extensions; launching AWS CodeWhisperer and Amazon Q; driving 17× adoption growth for AWS IDE Toolkits; saving millions annually through build system strategy at Snowflake; and contributing to five major Windows releases (XP–10). I specialize in creating high-trust, high-accountability cultures that grow products, improve quality, and strengthen organizations over the long term.

About Me

Across my career, I’ve consistently gravitated toward roles where the challenge was to fix what’sF broken, scale what works, and build healthy organizations around both. I’ve been the second leadership hire on a new Microsoft team that grew to 60 people, and I’ve also led multi-team organizations at Amazon and Microsoft. That breadth — from early formation to large-scale management — gives me a unique perspective on how to grow teams and products responsibly. What defines my work isn’t just product outcomes, but 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, developing a pipeline of future leaders who extend impact beyond my own span of control.
• Driving cultural transformations — shifting teams from reactive firefighting and burnout toward proactive, sustainable engineering practices.
• Public speaking & thought leadership: A speaker at major industry events including 2019 AWS New York Summit (18,000+ attendees) and 2011 Microsoft Build, sharing best practices in developer tools and engineering systems.

What Colleagues Say About Me - Direct Quotes from Annual Reviews

• "George trusts team members to make decisions and provides inspiration and guidance when we need it. I especially appreciate when I can bring George into a tough conversation because I know he'll be on my side and help find a solution."

  — Direct Report, 2023

• "George has hired some very skilled managers"

  — Peer, 2023

• "Under George's leadership, the Toolkits team managed to deliver more results than anyone expected."

  — Manager, 2024

• "I was surprised to see myself venturing into new, challenging roles as a result of George's encouragement and guidance. George is unfailingly considerate and attentive to his team."

  — Direct Report, 2021

• "I really liked how under his leadership the IDE Toolkits was able to release smaller and bigger features on a consistent cadence"

  — Peer, 2021