C. Jeff Lawson

I'm an engineering leader with a career spanning infrastructure, security, and platform engineering at scale. At Amazon Web Services, I work in the network acceleration and DDoS mitigation space, and serve as an internal advocate for using AI to ship customer features faster, sharpen how we diagnose issues, and communicate our value more clearly to customers. Before AWS, I spent over a decade at Chegg building and leading engineering teams across security, fraud prevention, and payments — and before that, I was part of the network engineering team at Netflix during the early years of streaming.

For a long time, I've been frustrated by the gap between having an idea and actually building it — the hours of scaffolding, boilerplate, and context-switching that stood between a concept and something real. With AI as a collaborator, that gap has collapsed. Iteration that used to take hours now takes minutes. I find myself genuinely excited to prototype again — idea to implementation is no longer a friction point, it's just the work.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, where I spend time outside with a camera and in the kitchen.