I've spent 20+ years building software and leading the people who build it — starting as an individual contributor and working through Director, CTO, and VP Engineering before landing at AWS. I've done this across five industries: cloud infrastructure, HealthTech, IoT/Fleet SaaS, Oil & Gas, and energy. The problems change. The fundamentals don't.
Today I'm a Software Development Manager at AWS, leading two teams building Amazon ECS — the container orchestration platform that runs a significant slice of the internet. My current focus is ECS Link, a new horizontal service that centralises network interface provisioning across the ECS control plane. It's the kind of work that only makes sense at AWS scale: zero-downtime migration across all 36 AWS regions, 19 services, and hundreds of millions of daily task launches.
How I got here
My path wasn't linear. Before AWS I was VP Engineering at XSENSOR, a Calgary HealthTech company, leading 70 engineers across five teams building pressure-sensing technology for clinical and industrial use. Before that I was CTO at FLEETBridge, where we built an IoT/Fleet SaaS platform from scratch — full stack, mobile, and hardware integrations. Earlier still, Director of Software Development at IRISNDT (Oil & Gas inspection software) and IT Solutions Architect at Enerflex.
Each role taught me something the previous one couldn't. Startups taught me to make decisions fast with incomplete information. AWS taught me to make decisions slow with enormous consequences.
How I lead
I think the job of an engineering manager is to make the team better, not to be the smartest person in the room. That means investing heavily in people — I've facilitated 8 promotions on my current team (5 L4→L5, 3 L5→L6) with zero regretted attrition — and holding a high bar for craft and reliability. We run at 99.99%+ API availability. That number doesn't happen by accident.
I care about clarity. Clear goals, clear feedback, clear decisions. Engineers do their best work when they understand why, not just what.
What I'm working on now
I'm completing an MSc in Artificial Intelligence, with a focus on agentic AI systems. I'm applying what I'm learning directly — to my team, to our codebase, and to how I think about the next decade of engineering leadership. That's what this site is about: writing from the inside, not the sidelines.
Reach me at ash@ashai.ca or LinkedIn.