The AWS community is committed to fostering diversity, and making sure a rewarding career in tech is accessible to everyone.
But there’s still a long way to go. According to Gartner, women hold just 26% of tech-related roles in the global workforce, and our Jefferson Frank Careers and Hiring Guide: AWS Edition found that 76% of women (compared with just 53% of men) believe gender inequality exists in the industry.
AWS is focused on improving that number through efforts to increase diverse representation, striving to enable “every color, gender, belief, origin, and community” to work with the platform.
This includes a number of employee communities, already with tens of thousands of members, that enable women at AWS to champion efforts that grow representation — including Women in Technology, Women in Engineering, Women in AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning), Women in Big Data, and She Builds.
AWS also recognizes the wider systemic causes of gender imbalance in the tech industry, launching programs like AWS GetIT to encourage more young students, especially girls, to pursue careers in technology.
AWS also announced a global partnership with Girls in Tech in 2021 — a non-profit committed to eliminating the gender gap in tech — which will support the Girls in Tech annual conference, digital career fair, a virtual mentorship program, and other initiatives.
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AWS female superheroes
Just 14% of today’s AWS Heroes identify as women.
It’s important that we look to the future when thinking about supporting women in the tech industry, but that’s not to say there aren’t heaps of phenomenal female tech professionals doing great work in the AWS ecosystem right now.
We always love shouting about the amazing work being done by awesome women in the AWS community, so in this post, we shine a light on some of the inspiring women making waves in the AWS world and leading the charge on digital transformation through cloud tech.
These tech pros are driving incredible developments in the cloud space and blazing a trail for women in tech—so if you want to know more about Amazon Web Services, here are 20 AWS Heroes who should be on your radar:
Container Heroes
Hero since: 2019
Twitter: @lizrice
One of the latest Heroes to join the fold, Liz Rice became an AWS MVP in September 2019. As VP Open Source Engineering at cloud-native security specialists Aqua Security, Liz oversees a range of container-related open source projects.
Liz is also chair of the CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee, and has previously performed the role of Co-Chair of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 events in Copenhagen, Shanghai, and Seattle.
A regular speaker at conferences including AWS re:Invent, Velocity, and DockerCon, Liz is renowned for her ability to perfectly explain highly technical concepts and ideas, making the world of containers accessible.
An accomplished tech writer, Liz’s articles have appeared on the likes of TheNewStack, the Aqua Security blog, and TechBeacon—as well as her own blog. She also co-authored the O’Reilly report on Kubernetes Security.
Hero since: 2019
Twitter: @SysAdmGirl
Vicky Seno is a professor who teaches an assortment of AWS-related courses that cover topics like Computing Services, Containers, Kubernetes, ECS, Serverless, Networking and Security.
After garnering more than two decades of experience in IT, Vicky turned educator, becoming a Computer Science Professor at Los Angeles’ Santa Monica College. Since joining the faculty, Vicky has worked to develop an AWS Cloud Computing college degree, and has helped train staff from countless colleges in the region in an effort to create more educational options for those looking to learn more about AWS.
As well as being an AWS Container Hero and co-organizer of SMC’s AWS Cloud Day Conference, Vicky is also an AWS Cloud Faculty Ambassador; an accolade bestowed upon her to acknowledge her contribution to AWS education in the teaching community.
Vicky works tirelessly not only to disseminate knowledge of AWS, but also to encourage more female representation in the cloud field.
A YouTuber with more than 34,000 followers and over 100 tutorials on her channel, she’s also delivered coding workshops, spoken at Amazon Summits on Containers, Kubernetes and Amazon EKS, and even developed training materials for A Cloud Guru.
Hero since: 2022
Twitter: @RoxsRoss
As a DevOps Consultant and Trainer, Rossana works alongside teams of developers and DevOps engineers in her current role to optimize their existing processes for automations, CI/CD, containerization, and orchestration.
Outside of this role, she’s also a passionate knowledge sharer, breaking down complicated topics into simpler insights over on her YouTube channel, 295Devops. And when Rossana isn’t sharing her wisdom online, she’s usually educating in-person, regularly speaking on Containers technologies at AWS Community Days, ContainersDays, and more.
Her aim is to inspire more professionals to pursue a new career in the cloud, and make it easier for them to take their first steps by teaching them the foundational knowledge they need. On a mission to level the playing field and improve female representation through these efforts, Rosanna also presents at Women in Technology’s local meetups to encourage more women into DevOps careers, and assists with AWS Girls Argentina, a space for learning and inclusion for women from different fields to explore AWS services.
Data Heroes
Hero since: 2019
Twitter: @helenanders26
An AWS Certified Cloud Practioner, Helen Anderson is one of AWS’s very first Data Heroes, part of a new category created to represent a “community of developers, IT leaders, and educators with a shared passion for analytics, database, and blockchain technologies.”
A Business Intelligence Consultant from Wellington, New Zealand, by day, Helen leads on projects that empower users and make businesses more efficient by utilizing AWS products.
Herself a career-switcher, Helen is an ardent advocate for making AWS accessible to those new to the technology. In her spare time, Helen writes newbie-friendly articles, teaches, and mentors budding AWS enthusiasts, particularly those who’re underrepresented in the tech sector. She also authored one of Dev.to’s most popular AWS posts of all time, “AWS from A to Z.”
Hero since: 2015
Twitter: @lynnlangit
Lynn Langit describes herself as a “Cloud Architect who codes”, but she’s also an educator, an advocate for all things cloud, and a trailblazer in the world of big data and cloud architecture.
As a big data specialist, Lynn has worked with tools like AWS Athena, Aurora, Redshift, Kinesis, and the IoT.
Dedicated to sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm about cloud computing, Lynn is the cofounder of the Teaching Kids Programming, which has taken her to places in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia to talk about data and cloud technologies.
A sought-after speaker, she’s presented at developer conferences worldwide, and also delivers valuable training content online, developing and sharing courses on practicalities of working with AWS for Lynda.com.
Hero since: 2020
LinkedIn: Amy Tseng
Amy started her AWS journey back in 2017, where she was responsible for Fannie Mae’s database migration strategy and implementation from on-premise to AWS. In this role, she led the evaluation and recommendation of products to successfully influence key stakeholders in opting for Amazon Redshift as the enterprise cloud data warehouse solution. Since then, she’s also assisted in the migration of many on-premise databases to Redshift, Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon Neptune, and Amazon DynamoDB.
Currently, Amy leads Transamerica’s data strategy, execution, and transformation in her role as Director of Data Engineering. Passionate about exploring new technologies, she works closely with AWS product teams to deliver new features and enhance services, encouraging those she works with to innovate using emerging technologies. Right now, for example, Amy is working on building a data lake and surrounding data ecosystem at Transamerica, including a data warehouse and data science and analytics architectures.
Outside of her role, Amy is enthusiastic about increasing representation across the community, presenting at Women in Technology’s local meetups to inspire more women to pursue a career path in Big Data. She’s also passionate about empowering more professionals with knowledge and insights, presenting a Data Warehouse Migration session at AWS re:Invent 2019 and Implementing Hybrid Data Warehouse at the AWS Public Sector Summit.
Hero since: 2021
Twitter: @anahit_fi
As Lead Cloud Software Engineer at Solita, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and one of Finland’s largest digital transformation companies, Anahit has over a decade of experience architecting and building software solutions for all sorts of customer types.
Her current focus is primarily on AWS Data and Serverless, having previously worked on monolithic on-prem software before making her move to the cloud. Since then, she’s developed a particular interest in the AWS Kinesis family and how it integrates with AWS Lambda.
That said, Anahit has a passion for learning the ins and outs of all the technologies she works with, and strives to share her learnings to ensure others benefit from her expertise too. For example, she’s a speaker at both local and international events, including AWS meetups, AWS Community Days, ServerlessDays, and Code Mesh. And if that wasn’t enough, Anahit also regularly blogs about AWS and has been a frequent guest on various podcasts.
Hero since: 2020
Twitter: @allPowerde
Dr. Denis Bauer is passionate about facilitating the digital transformation of the health and life-science sector, and develops cloud-based ML bioinformatics solutions that help fight disease and improve human health in her role as Principal Research Scientist at Australia’s government research agency (CSIRO). Her work on CSIRO’s digital health research program has led to the development of one of the first serverless architectures — GT-Scan, the search engine for genome engineering —and open-source products like VariantSpark, the ML tool for analyzing ultra-high dimensional data, which was the first AWS Marketplace health product from a public sector organization.
Driven by a passion for knowledge sharing, Denis is also an associate professor at Macquarie University, and works tirelessly both in and out of these roles to build a strong community of practice through open-source technology, keynote presentations, and inclusive interdisciplinary collaborations.
And the results speak for themselves. Take, for example, Denis’ recent collaboration with her organization’s Scientific Computing and Cloud Platforms experts and AWS Data Hero, Lynn Langit, which enabled the creation of cloud-based bioinformatics solutions used by 10,000 researchers every single year.
Machine Learning Heroes
Hero since: 2019
Twitter: @KeshaWillz
A 20 year veteran of software development, Kesha Williams is a champion of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Having started her career as a Java Developer, Kesha transitioned into the ML world after gaining experience with tools like AWS DeepLens, Amazon Rekognition, and Amazon SageMake.
Kesha is committed to advocating for the benefit integrated technology can bring to the world. Through her work as an AWS Technical Instructor at A Cloud Guru, Kesha seeks to utilize technology like Amazon SageMaker to foster greater and more meaningful human connections.
Highly active in the AWS community, Kesha dedicates much of her time to helping others on their ML journeys. She’s shared her knowledge by authoring courses for the likes of Manning Publications, Packt, LinkedIn Learning, A Cloud Guru, and Cloud Academy.
She’s also an accomplished speaker and has appeared at global events such as AI World, DataSciCon.Tech, NDC{London}, Pluralsight LIVE, and AWS re:Invent.
Hero since: 2018
Twitter: @othergill
Head of Cloud Engineering and AI at digital assistance startup Workgrid, Gillian McCann is a champion of cloud-native architecture.
Previously an Architect on Liberty Mutual’s Cognitive Technology team, Gillian has long been interested in exploring the concept of conversational AI, and how machine learning can improve the human experience.
An accomplished and sought-after speaker, Gillian has shared her love of all things AI, smart search, and Lambda at AWS re:Invent, ServerlessConf, and countless AWS User Groups and local events.
Hero since: 2019
Twitter: @virtualgill
Gillian Armstrong is a Solutions Architect at Liberty IT, where she works to help enterprise businesses harness the power of Machine Learning and Serverless through hands-on architecting, strategy development, and education.
Gillian is particularly passionate about Applied AI, and how the melding of machine learning and serverless technology is changing the way Software Engineers bake intelligence into their systems. Unsurprisingly, she’s a big believer in AWS AI services, and is dedicated to exploring how tools like Amazon SageMaker can bridge the gap between Engineers and Data Scientists.
An avid distributor of knowledge, Gillian regularly shares what she learns in blogs, at local meet-ups, and as a speaker at huge global tech events like AWS re:Invent, QCon and ServerlessDays.
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Serverless Heroes
Hero since: 2019
Twitter: @FarrahC32
Farrah Campbell is Ecosystems Director at serverless workflow company Stackery; a role that sees her leading the company’s engagement with AWS, partners, system integrators, and the wider cloud community.
As part of her work in the Serverless, DevOps, and Women in Tech communities, Farrah travels the world, speaking at industry events, conferences, and user groups, as well as organizing the Portland Serverless Days and the Portland Serverless Meetup.
Farrah has also appeared as part of the Chasing Grace Project, a documentary series about women in the tech space that aims to “ build a more inclusive and transparent culture in tech and to recruit and retain women to help build the future.”
Hero since: 2018
Twitter: @ewindisch
A CTO, tech company co-founder, and systems architecture fanatic, Erica Windisch was the first female AWS Serverless Hero, and remained so until late 2019 when Farrah Campbell joined the club.
Erica has long been at the forefront of cloud computing, having advocated for the technology for almost two decades. An early champion of the OpenStack platform, she contributed to and maintained the Docker project, working on fortifying Linux containers and establishing security practices.
Today, through her company IOpipe, Erica helps organizations get the most out of serverless applications.
In her spare time, she’s a frequent speaker at tech conferences, giving talks about AWS Lambda and other AWS solutions, and also writes for the IOpipe blog.
Hero since: 2020
Twitter: @AngelaTimofte
As Data Platform Manager at Trustpilot, Angela is committed to leading by example and empowering professionals to develop and upskill to achieve their career goals.
With an impressive track record of transitioning legacy applications to new platforms and product offerings, Angela has a refined expertise, driven to build scalable solutions with the latest technologies while migrating away from monolithic solutions using serverless applications and event-driven architecture.
Passionate about knowledge sharing, coaching, and public speaking, she also frequently shares this expertise as a frequent speaker about serverless technologies at AWS Summits, AWS Community Days, ServerlessDays, and more. Angela also co-organizes the Copenhagen AWS User Group.
Hero since: 2021
Twitter: @ivlo11
Ivonne has over 15 years of experience in software development – ten of which have been in AWS, and more than five in building serverless applications – meaning she knows a thing or two about tech. In fact, her expertise spans across developing mission-critical production workloads, researching new technologies and design patterns, building prototypes, and establishing reference architectures, to name just a few.
In her previous role at Edelman Financial Engines, Ivonne and her team pioneered the development and operational readiness of the first microservices from a Java monolith modernization project. On this Ivonne instructed Software Engineers on the industry best practices they should follow as the organization shifted all-in on AWS with a serverless-first software development philosophy.
In her current role as Software Architect at Bill.com, Ivonne leads her team in re-architecting, modernizing, and componentizing the application stack, as well as developing scalable and resilient microservices on AWS with a focus on serverless. She’s also passionate about sharing her in-depth knowledge outside of her professional role, demystifying and removing the hurdles of adopting serverless architecture and simplifying the software development lifecycle on her blog and YouTube channel.
Community Heroes
Hero since: 2019
Twitter: @aileengemma
As Founder and CEO of business intelligence solution provider Vizalytics Technology, Aileen Gemma Smith and her team help clients worldwide get more out of their data through analytics.
A self-taught developer specializing in graph databases, semantic technologies and RDF, Aileen’s work focuses on taxonomies, ontologies and building out entity relationships in their proprietary knowledge graph.
Aileen is also a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion initiatives, and much of the great work that led her to become an AWS Community Hero centers around highlighting the work and interests of marginalized tech professionals.
She’s backed the development of hiring initiatives and mentoring schemes to encourage students to pursue a career in tech, and appeared on panels such as We Power Tech: Inclusive Conversations with Women in Technology at AWS Public Sector Summit Canberra in 2018.
Aileen has also served as a board member for the likes of the New York City Board of Education, Career and Technology Education IT Commission, and participated in the NYC Open Data Advisory Council.
On top of all that, Aileen is a record-breaker: the AWS Community Day event she organized in Melbourne earlier this year was the biggest one ever anywhere in the world, attracting a massive 1,096 attendees!
Hero since: 2017
Twitter: @beckyame_0412
A pillar of China’s AWS ecosystem, Becky Zhang has been central to developing and supporting the region’s cloud community.
The COO of Big Data solutions and AWS architecture consultancy BootDev, Becky regularly orchestrates events and user groups that bring Shanghai’s AWS professionals and enthusiasts together to network, impart knowledge, and share their passion for the product.
As well as helping to organize AWS User Group Shanghai, AWS Tech Meetups, and happy hours, Becky brings China’s AWS User Group members together with groups in other regions such as Korea, Japan, and Thailand.
Her work championing Shanghai’s AWS User Group has included being a panelist at AWS re:Invent 2016, and she also appeared at the Seoul AWS Summit in April to introduce the UG and help connect it with other groups around the world.
Becky is dedicated to supporting and uplifting other Women in Tech, and works to encourage more female professionals to enter the cloud space.
Hero since: 2016
Twitter: @applebear_ayu
Currently an IT Infrastructure Strategist at Honda Motor Co. in Japan, Ayumi Tada is passionate about helping businesses apply cloud tech. Ayumi previously worked for Honda R&D arms as an IT System Administrator, where she specialized in using the cloud for High Performance Computing (HPC).
Her work on HPC saw her advocate and present a use case for AWS-based HPC at AWS re:Invent in 2014.
A deeply engaged member of Japan AWS User Group, Ayumi founded a number of new JAWS branches, both for HPC specialists and for those just starting to get to grips to AWS. She’s also central to the operation of the JAWS group for female AWS professionals and is a regular face at local UGs and JAWS for Enterprises (E-JAWS) meetups.
Ayumi is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect and has a BS in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and Information Engineering from Waseda University.
Hero since: 2019
Twitter: @installjournal
An AWS Community Hero and Certified Solution Architect, Bhuvaneswari Subramani is Director Engineering Operations at Infor and has nearly 20 years of IT experience under her belt.
A specialist in cloud computing, DevOps and performance testing, Bhuvaneswari is an entirely self-made tech pro with a zeal for technical writing and an uncanny knack of explaining complex technical concepts.
A relentless blogger with more than a decade of experience writing about DevOps and cloud computing, she’s also heavily involved in her local AWS community.
Bhuvaneswari is a co-organizer of the AWS User Group Bengaluru and plays a huge part in arranging meetups and AWS Community Days. She’s a talented speaker too, having given talks at many events and conferences, as well as delivering guest lectures on the cloud at engineering colleges.
Like so many of our AWS Community Heroes, Bhuvaneswari is committed to fostering diversity in the industry, and in 2018, she was one of five recipients of the AWS re:Invent 2018 Community Leader Diversity Scholarship.
Hero since: 2016
Twitter: @teriradichel
As CEO at cloud security training outfit 2nd Sight Lab, Teri Radichel works to help companies stay safe in the cloud through consulting, testing, and training.
With multiple cybersecurity certifications to her name, including the GSE, Teri is a major authority on cloud security research and has written articles for the likes of Light Reading and Infosecurity Magazine. She shares security information and advice via her blog, Cloud Security, and is now working on a book; Cybersecurity for Executives.
Teri is also the founder and primary organizer of the Seattle AWS Architects and Engineers Meetup, which has amassed almost 3,000 members to date.
She frequently delivers talks on cloud security at conferences too, having made appearances at events like RSA, AWS re:Invent, AWS re:Inforce, IANS Security Forums, Countermeasure, SANS Networking, SANS Cloud Summit, and BSides.
In 2017, Teri received the SANS Difference Makers Award, which aims to recognize the work of people who made a difference in cybersecurity.
Hero since: 2019
Twitter: @MargaretValtie
An AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate, Margaret Valtierra works as a Program Manager for Morningstar’s Cloud Service team, where she’s tasked with managing the company’s relationship with AWS, helping others develop their cloud skills, and encouraging best practices.
In previous roles, she led cross-functional Agile teams, heading up their efforts to manage and secure new services for multiple big data projects in AWS.
Margaret has been the leader of Chicago’s AWS user group since 2013, and is a member of the Global AWS Community Day Core Team which works to promote local user groups and organizes the yearly AWS Community Day event for the Midwest. She’s also a co-organizer for DevOpsDays Chicago.
Hero since: 2022
LinkedIn: Dipali Kulshrestha
With over 18 years of IT experience specializing in Solution Architecture and Application Modernization, and a focus on data-intensive applications, Dipali’s expertise speaks for itself. She’s currently Vice President of Data Engineering at Natwest Group, and as part of this role, she mentors as an AWS trainer through Cloud Practitioner and Solution Architect workshops every quarter.
With an AWS Solution Architect – Professional certification under her belt, Dipali is an AWS Delhi User Group leader and an active speaker at AWS community events. And as a huge advocate of diversity and inclusion within the industry, she was recently featured in AWS India’s Developers of AWS, and interviewed by Tech Gig on the importance of cloud upskilling.
She’s passionate about creating simple and easy-to-maintain solutions for complex business problems, but just as importantly, sharing the knowledge that inspires these solutions with the AWS community. As a result, Dipali has created an AWS re:Skill series for containers on AWS, as well as a DevOps with AWS course on LinkedIn Learning which has already educated over 12000 learners!
Hero since: 2020
Twitter: @hiro_baila
Hiromi has been an enthusiastic member of the AWS community since 2014 when she first joined the Japanese AWS user group and became actively involved in the creation of a women’s group in Japan. Since then, she’s been involved in the overall running of the user group and the community work of regional groups, organizing many events including JAWS DAYS and being named AWS Samurai on multiple occasions.
Hiromi has been involved in joint study sessions with overseas AWS user groups and APAC Community Leader Meetups since 2016, and created the AWS Asian Women’s Association (Global Community) to host conference events and online meetups across Asia in 2019. In that same year, she was selected as an AWS re:Invent Community Leader Diversity Grant recipient, and continues to lead the way in expanding the AWS community to every corner of the globe today.
Hero since: 2020
Twitter: @hirokonishimura
Hiroko Nishimura is the epitome of a community hero. Since switching careers from Special Education back in 2018, she has strived to help others deconstruct and comprehend cloud computing jargon so that they too can pursue a cloud career.
Before transitioning to technical writing and technical instruction, Hiroko was a SysAdmin at a tech startup in NYC. And while she worked hard at building her own expertise in these roles, she worked to share this knowledge with others across the wider community, too.
Passionate about creating communities and resources to help people from diverse backgrounds learn AWS jargon-free, Hiroko founded AWS Newbies, published AWS for Non-Engineers, and teaches Introduction to AWS for Non-Engineers courses on LinkedIn Learning to help professionals with non-traditional tech backgrounds begin their AWS journeys.
As the work of these innovative and generous cloud professionals continues to make waves across the AWS ecosystem, we hope next year’s list of female AWS Heroes will be longer. In the meantime, give them a follow and get the inside scoop on the latest developments in AWS.
