Dan Eshner

Guest Speaker

Amazon

Dan Eshner started his career nearly 20 years ago in Artificial Intelligence, working on incremental problem solving and knowledge representation. From there, he went on to manage some development projects for the US department of Transportation, with a focus on some distributed object systems for traffic engineering, and early implementations of distributed database and web systems. After 4 years, Dan jumped at the chance to both move out of Washington DC, and work on shrink-wrap software development at IMSI in New Mexico and Novato, CA, where he ended up managing the engineering organization for the company, with approximately 180 people spread out over 4 countries and 8 states. Dan moved to Seattle to take over the engineering organization for Intel in Seattle, managing 100 people in Seattle and Portland, and built a 30 person engineering organization for a startup in Redmond during the dotcom boom. For the past 3 years prior to Amazon, Dan worked as a Sr. architect and strategist for IBM, helping to drive the on demand software strategy and architecture in the systems and technology group. Within Amazon Dan manages the Item Management infrastructure that controls all of the authoritative descriptions of the items on Amazon