Mid-stride at AWS - where supply chain thinking meets cloud at scale
Somewhere between managing the P&L for Amazon's Major Appliances business and building Coupang's Seattle office from nothing, Brent Hodgson developed a skill that most cloud executives don't have: he knows what happens when complex operational systems break down, and he knows it from the floor up.
Now VP of Strategic Customer Engagements at Amazon Web Services, Hodgson works where the real friction lives - the intersection of enterprise ambition and cloud reality. The title says "engagements." The job is closer to expedition guide for organizations attempting some of the most complicated technology transformations on the planet.
Strategic Customer Engagements at AWS is not a sales function wearing a strategy hat. It's a specialized team that embeds with enterprises facing multi-year, multi-system migration challenges - the kind where the stakes are high enough that a misstep affects thousands of employees, millions of customers, or the kind of compliance obligations that make executives lose sleep. Hodgson leads that team.
"His management style was focused, yet hands-off - and he was always willing to help when needed."
- Former colleagueWhat's unusual about Hodgson's path to cloud leadership is that it ran through a supply chain degree and a decade in Amazon's hardest retail categories - tools, appliances, parts, accessories. These are not glamorous verticals. They are relentlessly operationally demanding: high SKU counts, complex vendor relationships, margin pressure, and logistics problems that compound each other.
At Amazon, Hodgson ran vendor management for the Tools Division - a category that requires negotiating across hundreds of suppliers, managing promotional cycles, setting pricing strategy, and watching inventory costs like a hawk. He also held P&L ownership for Major Appliances and Appliance Parts and Accessories - businesses that, beneath the surface, are logistics challenges as much as retail ones.
The Coupang Chapter
Before returning to Amazon's cloud arm, Hodgson joined Coupang as one of the first members of its Seattle office. He built the global sourcing and cross-border e-commerce team from scratch, reported directly to the CEO, and deployed the merchandising and supply chain systems that underpinned the company's international expansion. Coupang, for context, became one of Asia's largest e-commerce companies - with a 2021 NYSE IPO that valued it at over $84 billion. Hodgson was there in the building years.
The through-line across Amazon retail, Coupang, and AWS is a recurring instinct: find the system that's breaking, understand why it's breaking, and build the thing that fixes it. In retail, that was vendor relationships and supply chain architecture. At Coupang, it was global sourcing and cross-border logistics. At AWS, it's enterprise cloud adoption - specifically the deep operational work required to move legacy systems, organizational cultures, and complex data architectures to the cloud without destroying what already works.
Hodgson works out of AWS's Seattle headquarters at 410 Terry Avenue North, a building that sits between Lake Union and Capitol Hill - physically close to Amazon's retail campus, symbolically distinct from it. AWS is the profit engine that makes Amazon's everything-else possible. Strategic Customer Engagements is the division that ensures the world's largest enterprises stay on that engine.
The keywords attached to Hodgson's work at AWS read like a threat matrix for any enterprise CIO: cloud security, data security, security monitoring, privileged account security, application security, cyber intelligence. These aren't marketing categories - they are the live concerns of every regulated industry attempting a cloud migration. Banking, healthcare, government, logistics. The customers Hodgson's team works with are likely operating across all of them.