Steve Ash

I'm a hands-on technical leader with 20+ years of experience solving problems at the intersection of academia and industry, delivering scalable, production software products. As a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS, I keep my hands on the keyboard while shaping technical strategy for orgs of 1,000+ people — and I care just as much about empowering the next generation of leaders as I do about the technology.

I hold a PhD in computer science, with 10+ issued patents and 10+ papers published in academic conferences. I'm deeply curious, with extensive experience in AI, distributed systems, and scaling systems, people, and orgs. I love bootstrapping small, scrappy teams to deliver seemingly impossible projects, and I thrive under pressure and ambiguity.

Find me

Selected work

Amazon Quick

Agentic AI platform for business users — unified conversational agents, BI, automation flows, and analysis/research agents.
Amazon Q Scenarios

Interactive canvas for analyzing structured data in natural language, powered by planning, reasoning, and code agents. Led as technical owner from whiteboard to delivery.
Generative BI in Amazon QuickSight Q

Authoring charts and calculations from natural language — the first major BI tool to put generative AI in customers' hands. Owned whiteboard to production.
Amazon QuickSight Q

Natural-language Q&A over databases — shipped before ChatGPT.
AWS Glue ML Transforms · FindMatches

Generic record-linkage-at-scale solution for AWS Glue.
Identity & fraud at scale (ARGO, FIS)

Patient identity resolution across statewide hospital systems and HIEs; real-time and batch check-fraud detection at top US/Canada banks; check-image exchange among the top 25 US banks.