Starbucks named Amazon exec Anand Varadarajan as its new chief technology officer, tapping a leader with extensive experience in Amazon’s grocery technology and supply chain operations.

Varadarajan, a 19-year Amazon veteran, will succeed Deb Hall Lefevre, who left the company in September, according to the announcement Friday by Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol.

It comes as Starbucks works to revamp technology in its stores to improve order flow and speed of service. It’s part of the “Back to Starbucks” turnaround effort Niccol launched after becoming CEO in September 2024.

Separately, Starbucks said in its latest 10K filing that it needs to keep improving its marketing, data analytics, and AI tools or risk losing consumer interest and market share.

Ningyu Chen had been serving as Starbucks’ interim CTO since Lefevre’s departure.

Varadarajan “knows how to create systems that are reliable and secure, drive operational excellence and scale solutions that keep customers at the center,” Niccol wrote in the memo, also praising him for caring “deeply about supporting and developing the people behind the scenes that build and enable the technology we use.”

At Amazon, Varadarajan most recently led technology and supply chain for the company’s worldwide grocery business, including Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh. He previously held software engineering roles at Oracle and several startups.

Varadarajan will join the coffee giant as executive vice president and CTO on Jan. 19, reporting directly to Niccol and joining the company’s executive leadership team. 

He holds an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and master’s degrees from Purdue (civil engineering) and the University of Washington (computer science). 

Niccol noted in the memo that Varadarajan is a marathon runner working toward completing all seven World Marathon Majors, and a coffee enthusiast who starts most days with a tall latte.

LAS VEGAS — Matt Garman remembers sitting in an Amazon leadership meeting six or seven years ago, thinking about the future, when he identified what he considered a looming crisis.

Garman, who has since become the Amazon Web Services CEO, calculated that the company would eventually need to hire a million developers to deliver on its product roadmap. The demand was so great that he considered the shortage of software development engineers (SDEs) the company’s biggest constraint.

With the rise of AI, he no longer thinks that’s the case.

Speaking with Acquired podcast hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal at the AWS re:Invent conference Thursday afternoon, Garman told the story in response to Gilbert’s closing question about what belief he held firmly in the past that he has since completely reversed.

“Before, we had way more ideas than we could possibly get to,” he said. Now, “because you can deliver things so fast, your constraint is going to be great ideas and great things that you want to go after. And I would never have guessed that 10 years ago.”

He was careful to point out that Amazon still needs great software engineers. But earlier in the conversation, he noted that massive technical projects that once required “dozens, if not hundreds” of people might now be delivered by teams of five or 10, thanks to AI and agents.

Garman was the closing speaker at the two-hour event with the hosts of the hit podcast, following conversations with Netflix Co-CEO Greg Peters, J.P. Morgan Payments Global Co-Head Max Neukirchen, and Perplexity Co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas.

A few more highlights from Garman’s comments:

Generative AI, including Bedrock, represents a multi-billion dollar business for Amazon. Asked to quantify how much of AWS is now AI-related, Garman said it’s getting harder to say, as AI becomes embedded in everything. 

Speaking off-the-cuff, he told the Acquired hosts that Bedrock is a multi-billion dollar business. Amazon clarified later that he was referring to the revenue run rate for generative AI overall. That includes Bedrock, which is Amazon’s managed service that offers access to AI models for building apps and services. [This has been updated since publication.]

How AWS thinks about its product strategy. Garman described a multi-layered approach to explain where AWS builds and where it leaves room for partners. At the bottom are core building blocks like compute and storage. AWS will always be there, he said.

In the middle are databases, analytics engines, and AI models, where AWS offers its own products and services alongside partners. At the top are millions of applications, where AWS builds selectively and only when it believes it has differentiated expertise.

Amazon is “particularly bad” at copying competitors. Garman was surprisingly blunt about what Amazon doesn’t do well. “One of the things that Amazon is particularly bad at is being a fast follower,” he said. “When we try to copy someone, we’re just bad at it.” 

The better formula, he said, is to think from first principles about solving a customer problem, only when it believes it has differentiated expertise, not simply to copy existing products.

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