Shaun Baker

Building the world's leading network for real-time communications with Amazon Connect powered by an AI agentic-backed network operations system.

I joined the Industry Products group at AWS to help AWS deliver business outcomes to enterprises more accustomed to buying vs. building solutions. I built the product architecture capability to support our ambitions across automotive, health care, manufacturing, operations and retail/cpg. I grew our capabilities by establishing scaled mechanisms to drive product-market-fitment and business case evaluation. I established value-mapping processes to guide investment decisions, led my team in the decomposition of opportunities into underlying technical architectures and overcame organizational barriers to the creation of higher order services. I am currently focused on building new services to enable our consumer packaged goods and retail customers remove friction from their customer-facing experiences.

I created the Energy Solutions Architecture team as part of a newly envisioned energy vertical focused on helping energy companies accelerate their cloud journey. To build the team, I evaluated best-practices, experiences, and learnings from other teams at AWS and evaluated our relative competitive positioning and differentiation. I influenced the overall go-to-market strategy and built our team to compliment that ambition. I partnered closely with Fortune 50 customers to earn trust and ultimately secured business for AWS with > $100m in global ARR uplift.

I joined ASI as a fractional CIO after they outgrew their initial approach to information technology. I led the work to stabilize their technology infrastructure and remove friction from their user experience to ready them for the next phase of growth. To enable the organization to win prime defense contracts, I designed a program to achieve Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) and realigned their data strategy to support their overall product and GTM ambition. I helped identify and select my successor to help continue their journey.

Having recently completed our cloud migration, I took this role to lead the transformation portion of our cloud ambition. To reduce cost and increase agility, I led my team of architects in the creation of business unit specific roadmaps to break apart monoliths, established tolerate, invest, migrate, eliminate guidance, and ready the organization for greater autonomy and business responsiveness through the creation of organic builder capabilities and an API-first culture. I established a work-study campus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign improving the gender balance amongst inbound talent at BP and providing a source of junior talent to fuel our efforts to insource critical capabilities.

I transformed BP’s Global Network Services into an evergreen, elastic and consistent set of component services. I led the depreciation of MPLS in favor on an internet-first approach built on an SD-WAN foundation, migrated the LAN footprints to a ‘colorless’ wireless topology and reduced spend by $30m/yr while delivering 5x performance and improving our information security posture. As part of the strategy, I insourced much of the network staff and built a blended model that leveraged the scale and capabilities of suppliers for commodity work while an internal, technology-focused, engineering and design led group fused traditional development/project work with operations. In addition, I partnered with Azure and AWS to explore approaches to the cloud to further depreciate the use of MPLS to further reduce WAN spend and reinvest in higher operational performance and a frictionless office experience. Using the approach pioneered in our office refresh, I worked with a key equipment vendor to create a smaller pattern usable for retail and guest experiences in our fuel/petrol stations. The transformed operations spanned 75 countries, 330 sites, 10k network devices, 1k circuits, and 17k fuel stations with a budget of $143m and 350 team members.

Direct leadership of a global team and indirect leadership of a Managed Service Provider (MSP) with over 50 people assigned to account. Accountable for network services in support of Mega Data Centers, worldwide Internet Gateways, all connections to Third-Parties and overall governance of the MPLS network.

I established a salesforce.com as our CRM platform for the future. I scaled the development team from three to 35 engineers and analysts and led the migration of all CRM capabilities from Siebel7 in 18 months. During the process, I established the first agile development practice within the IT organization and advised other leaders in their agile implementations. My team built a fully automated online configure-price-quote system to allow Account Managers to self-quote complex product opportunities in a manner aligned to our new product-centric selling approach.

As a commissioned military officer, I led the architecture, design, and operations of network services throughout the Pacific Rim in support of military operations. I deployed to Baghdad and led the construction and operation of the unified communications backbone for the United States and Multinational Forces in Iraq.

Evaluated the feasibility of utilizing massively-parallel real-time compression algorithms on largely numeric data streams in order to reduce disk input/output operations and maximize overall CPU utilization rates. Wrote my fellowship proposal based on the application of neural networks to information security log files using auto-encoder models. Glad the AI Winter is finally over.

Distinguished Graduate Award