With Amazon cutting Alexa devs, these banks might be interested

The wave of layoffs in tech are reaching critical mass. Twitter, Meta, Intel, Oracle, and now e-commerce giant Amazon have all announced huge workforce reductions.

Amazon is the latest to announce firings – some 10,000 people are expected to be laid off by the company, with the New York Times reporting that “cuts will focus on Amazon’s devices organisation, including the voice-assistant Alexa”.

Alexa engineers might find a welcome refuge in Morgan Stanley, which picked up Sreekar Bhaviripudi, a former senior research science manager from Amazon’s virtual assistant in January. He currently heads up the bank’s machine learning department as an MD. 

Apple’s Siri assistant also provided JPMorgan with engineers – notably, Chandra Shekhar Dhir, the bank’s current head of artificial intelligence and machine learning. JPMorgan is currently looking for an ED-level Conversational AI technologist.

Banks have long picked up Amazon tech alumni to power their tech solutions - although AWS engineers are their preference.

The prominent AWS alumnus is Marco Argenti, a former VP of technology at AWS. Goldman hired him as a partner in 2019. He’s now CIO. The firm's current global head of consumer business, Peeyush Nahar, is also a former Alexa engineer.

Goldman has had a long relationship with Amazon – CNBC reported last year that Goldman offers loans to Amazon merchants and advised the retailer on its acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, whilst the bank relied on AWS software to scale up its retail business, Marcus.

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