Amazon hires Microsoft's former Copilot CTO to build Kiro
Former Microsoft Copilot CTO Pedram Rezaei joined AWS to work on Kiro and Quick, as Amazon accelerates its push into AI coding and workplace tools.
Amazon just hired one of the key architects of Microsoft's Copilot to build its competing coding tools. Pedram Rezaei, a nearly 20-year Microsoft veteran who was most recently a corporate vice president on the Microsoft Superintelligence team, started Monday as a distinguished engineer in AWS's Agentic AI and Emerging Technologies organization, GeekWire reported.
Rezaei's resume is the interesting part. He joined Microsoft in 2006 and held senior technical roles on Power BI, Dynamics 365, Cortana, Bing, and Azure Maps before becoming Copilot's CTO in February of this year. His initial assignment at AWS: Kiro, the company's agentic coding tool, and Quick, Amazon's AI assistant for workplace tasks.
A hands-on hire for an agentic bet
AWS vice president Swami Sivasubramanian announced the hire in an internal memo, describing Rezaei as "a hands-on engineer who is still in the code every day, and he plans to keep it that way here." Rezaei's stated plan for his first few months: "meet people, learn how things work here, and ship something real."
The memo also included growth numbers Amazon rarely shares. Kiro's user count doubled from the first quarter to the second, and monthly AI users for Quick grew fourfold. Sivasubramanian's organization was expanded in July to cover emerging technologies as part of a broader reshuffling of Amazon's AI teams.
Not the only Microsoft-to-AWS move
Rezaei is part of a wider talent exchange. AWS rehired two longtime engineers from Microsoft to work on neurosymbolic AI and automated reasoning, which Sivasubramanian called "one of our biggest bets for the future": Marvin Theimer rejoined in July as a vice president and distinguished engineer, and Reto Kramer returned in September as vice president of applied science. The technology pairs large language models with rule-based systems that check whether an AI agent is following a company's policies, a direct answer to the enterprise question Sivasubramanian keeps hearing from CIOs: how do you know the agent will always obey the rules?
Shawn Bice also returned to AWS in May from a security role at Microsoft to lead its Automated Reasoning Group.
The coding-tool arms race
The hire lands as Amazon and Microsoft compete more directly in AI tools for work. Microsoft unveiled an all-in-one Copilot app last month combining chat, coding, and agents. Amazon made its Quick desktop app generally available in September and brought its main features to mobile.
Bringing in the person who ran engineering for Copilot is about as direct a competitive statement as a hire can be. Kiro is still early, but Amazon clearly intends it to be a production-grade answer to Copilot, Codex, and Claude Code, and it just put one of Microsoft's most experienced builders in charge of getting it there.
