James Hamilton is Senior Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon. He works on technology across the company focused on making complex systems scale, work reliably, and operate both safely and cost effectively. He has over 200 patents granted over 15 years at Amazon, 12 at Microsoft, and 10 at IBM.  He has held leadership roles on Ada and C++ programming language compiler teams, SQL Server and Db2 database engine development teams, high-scale cloud services, network router engineering, cloud server design, datacenter power distribution systems, datacenter mechanical systems, robotics, and logistics systems. In his spare time, he circumnavigated the world in a small boat, enjoys Formula 1 and NFL football, and is interested in just about all engineering disciplines.