Amazon Organizational Structure

About the company

Amazon.com, Inc. sells goods through its own retail business and through a third-party marketplace, operates the fulfilment and transportation network that moves them, runs the largest cloud infrastructure business in the world in Amazon Web Services, and has built an advertising business on top of both. It was founded in 1994, listed in 1997, and reported net sales of roughly $716.9 billion for fiscal year 2025 with about 1,576,000 full-time and part-time employees at the end of that year.

The structure is worth studying because the way Amazon reports itself and the way it is run are not the same shape. The 10-K has exactly three reportable segments — North America, International and AWS — and the filing is explicit that these reflect how management evaluates business performance. The management structure sits across them: two of the segments are run by one divisional CEO, advertising and media report separately to the group CEO, and none of the corporate functions belong to a segment at all.

Amazon has never published an org chart. What it does publish, unusually for a company this size, is the roster of its senior leadership team with exact titles, so the top two layers can be reconstructed from primary sources rather than guessed at. Everything below that is assembled from individual announcement posts, which is why this chart stops where the public record does.

Amazon.com, Inc. organizational chart

Amazon.com, Inc.'s reporting structure as of 2026-08. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom — or open it in QueryChart and edit it as your own.

Two divisional CEOs on a centralized functional spine

This chart depicts Amazon.com, Inc. as a single operating company, not a holding structure. Subsidiaries that have their own chief executives — Zoox, the autonomous-vehicle business run by Aicha Evans — sit inside the senior leadership team rather than under an intermediate holdco, which is why a subsidiary CEO and a group function head appear on the same tier of the diagram.

The two largest businesses each have a real CEO with a full profit and loss. Matt Garman runs Amazon Web Services, with infrastructure services, compute and machine-learning services, applied AI and a separate agentic AI organisation beneath him. Doug Herrington runs Worldwide Amazon Stores, which carries far more than retail: North America and International stores, emerging markets and selling partner services, worldwide operations, and Amazon Health Services. Between them these two people own the great majority of Amazon's revenue and almost all of its headcount.

Against that sits a functional spine reporting to the group CEO across both divisions: finance under Brian Olsavsky, global affairs and legal under David Zapolsky, People eXperience and Technology under Beth Galetti, plus communications, security and corporate development. The spine is genuinely central rather than nominal — John Felton is AWS's CFO and reports to Olsavsky, not to Garman, so the most autonomous division in the company does not own its own finance function. The layer immediately below the CEO is internally the S-team, which listed 27 leaders when checked in August 2026; membership in it and reporting directly to the CEO are not the same thing, and several members report to Herrington, Garman or Olsavsky instead.

The shape moves often. In December 2025 Andy Jassy pulled frontier AI out of the cloud commercial organisation, consolidating foundational model research, custom silicon and quantum computing into a single group under Peter DeSantis reporting straight to him, after the previous head of the AGI organisation left the company. Separately, a September 2024 mandate requires every major organisation to raise its individual-contributor-to-manager ratio by at least 15 percent, and roughly 14,000 corporate roles were cut in October 2025 followed by about 16,000 in January 2026 — in both cases framed as removing layers and bureaucracy rather than as cost reduction alone.

Key leadership roles

1. Andy Jassy

   President and Chief Executive Officer — Ran AWS for eighteen years before taking the group role in 2021; the flattening mandate and the December 2025 AI reorganisation are both his.

2. Matt Garman

   CEO, Amazon Web Services — Runs the cloud business as its own company with its own P&L, but not its own CFO.

3. Doug Herrington

   CEO, Worldwide Amazon Stores — Retail, marketplace, logistics, physical stores and health services all sit under this one role.

4. Brian Olsavsky

   Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer — Owns finance across both divisions, including the divisional CFOs.

5. Peter DeSantis

   SVP, Foundational AI Models, Custom Silicon, Quantum Computing — The group created in December 2025 to separate long-horizon AI and silicon work from the cloud commercial organisation.

6. David Zapolsky

   SVP, Chief Global Affairs & Legal Officer

7. Beth Galetti

   SVP, People eXperience and Technology

8. Panos Panay

   SVP, Devices & Services

9. Aicha Evans

   CEO, Zoox — A subsidiary chief executive who sits on the senior leadership team rather than under a holding company.

10. Swami Sivasubramanian

    VP, Agentic AI — Leads the agentic AI group formed inside AWS in March 2025, reporting to Matt Garman.

11. John Felton

    SVP, AWS CFO — Reports to the group CFO rather than to the AWS CEO — the clearest illustration of how central the finance function is.

12. Udit Madan

    SVP, Worldwide Operations — Amazon has not stated this reporting line in those words; placement under Worldwide Amazon Stores is the conventional reading of the announcement that created the role.

13. Roy Schoenberg

    SVP, Amazon Health Services — Announced in May 2026 to lead the business from 1 July 2026; Amazon's own leadership roster still listed his predecessor when this chart was compiled.

14. Dharmesh Mehta

    Technical Advisor to the CEO — Drawn as a lateral staff role, not a reporting line: the technical advisor sits in on the CEO's meetings and manages no organisation.

How this structure supports the business

Splitting AWS and Worldwide Amazon Stores into CEO-led divisions works because the two businesses have almost nothing operationally in common. One sells capacity to engineers on multi-year commitments and competes on price-performance per instance; the other moves physical goods through a fixed-cost network and competes on selection and delivery speed. Giving each its own CEO, its own P&L and its own hiring cadence means the trade-offs inside each are settled by people who understand them, and only genuinely cross-company questions travel up to the group CEO.

The centralized spine is what stops that autonomy from fragmenting the company. One finance organisation, one legal and global affairs posture and one security standard across roughly 1.6 million people is not a bureaucratic preference; at this scale, two sets of numbers or two security baselines would be a reporting and regulatory liability. Putting the divisional CFO's reporting line into group finance is the mechanism that makes the consistency real rather than aspirational.

The deliberate thinness of the management layer is the third element, and it is the one Amazon actively maintains. The long-standing two-pizza team and single-threaded-leader model pushes ownership down to small teams, and the standing requirement to increase the individual-contributor-to-manager ratio is an explicit brake on the layer growth that normally accompanies headcount growth. The structure assumes decisions are made close to the work and that the top layer exists to arbitrate, not to coordinate.

Advantages and disadvantages

Two divisions large enough to be standalone companies each get a CEO with a full profit and loss, so AWS and Worldwide Stores can set their own pricing, cadence and hiring without escalating to the group CEO.

It concentrates enormous scope in two people, and turns genuinely cross-cutting bets — advertising inside Prime Video, generative AI inside retail — into peer-to-peer negotiations with no single owner short of the CEO.

Centralizing finance, global affairs and legal, people and security gives a company of 1.6 million employees one set of numbers, one legal posture and one security standard.

Division leaders do not fully control their own staff functions. An AWS CFO who reports to the group CFO buys consistency at the price of slower division-local calls and a split loyalty in the person holding the role.

Few management layers, combined with the two-pizza team and single-threaded-leader model, pushes decisions down to small teams that own an outcome end to end.

Flattening by numeric mandate is a blunt instrument: a required 15 percent shift in the individual-contributor-to-manager ratio removes career rungs and widens spans of control for the managers who remain, and reporting through late 2025 and early 2026 described visible damage to morale.

Moving frontier model research, custom silicon and quantum computing into an organisation reporting straight to the CEO lets long-horizon work be funded without quarterly cloud revenue pressure, and lets models, chips and infrastructure be optimised together.

AI ownership is now spread across at least three organisations — foundational models and silicon under the CEO, agentic AI inside AWS, and AWS applied AI solutions — which creates overlapping mandates and internal competition for the same customers.

Interesting facts

• Amazon publishes its own senior leadership roster with exact titles, which is unusually explicit disclosure at this size; the list has ranged between roughly 23 and 31 people in recent years and is edited as leaders arrive and leave.
• The CEO has a full-time understudy. A technical advisor, informally the shadow, sits in on nearly every meeting for an 18-to-24-month term, and the role has functioned as a succession pipeline — Andy Jassy held it under Jeff Bezos.
• Senior decisions are made from prose rather than slides: PowerPoint is not used in leadership-team meetings, attendees read a six-page narrative memo in silence at the start, and new products begin as a press release and FAQ written before any code exists.
• Sixteen leadership principles are the formal rubric for hiring, promotion and performance review, and every hiring loop includes a bar raiser drawn from outside the hiring team who holds a veto over the offer — deliberately taking final hiring authority away from the manager who needs the headcount.
• AWS has its own CFO, but he reports to the group CFO rather than to the AWS CEO, so finance stays a centralized function even inside the most autonomous division of the company.
• Corporate staff are a small minority of the roughly 1,576,000 people Amazon employs, most of whom work in fulfilment and transportation — which is why two rounds of corporate layoffs totalling around 30,000 roles barely move the total headcount.

Frequently asked questions

What type of organizational structure does Amazon use?

A hybrid: two CEO-led product divisions, Amazon Web Services and Worldwide Amazon Stores, sitting over a centralized functional spine of finance, global affairs and legal, people, communications and security. It is not a pure divisional structure, because the corporate functions report to the group CEO across both divisions rather than into them.

Does Amazon's organizational structure match its three reporting segments?

No, and the 10-K says so directly: North America, International and AWS reflect how management evaluates business performance, not how the company is managed. One divisional CEO runs both store segments, advertising and media report separately to the group CEO, and none of the corporate functions belong to a segment at all.

Who reports directly to Andy Jassy?

The two divisional CEOs, the CFO, the chief global affairs and legal officer, the head of People eXperience and Technology, the leaders of devices, media, advertising, security and communications, and — since December 2025 — the foundational AI models, custom silicon and quantum computing group. Amazon publishes the senior leadership roster but not the reporting lines, so some of the individual lines in this chart are the conventional reading of announcement posts rather than statements Amazon has made.

What is Amazon's S-team?

The internal name for the senior leadership team, published on Amazon's own site; it listed 27 leaders when this chart was compiled. Membership is not the same as reporting to the CEO — several members report to Doug Herrington, Matt Garman or Brian Olsavsky — so the roster is a seniority list, not a reporting layer.

Why is Amazon cutting management layers?

Since a September 2024 mandate, every major organisation has been required to increase its individual-contributor-to-manager ratio by at least 15 percent. Roughly 14,000 corporate roles went in October 2025 and about 16,000 in January 2026, both framed as removing layers and bureaucracy rather than as cost cutting, on the argument that fewer layers means faster decisions and clearer ownership.

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