Brent Lemons

About Brent Lemons

I build and run engineering organizations that keep mission-critical cloud platforms operating at scale.Currently leading a large engineering organization at AWS Professional Services. The work I\'m most proud of: identifying an unmet need for resilience expertise, writing the business case, securing executive investment, and building the team that scaled the AWS Resilience Practice from zero to $15M+ annual revenue across three global regions. That effort produced multi-region operations best practices, SRE methodologies, chaos engineering programs, incident response frameworks, and operational runbooks now adopted enterprise-wide across a $287M active pipeline.Before AWS, I led the engineering organization at EmployBridge through a full cloud transformation — migrating from legacy on-premises infrastructure to AWS, implementing CI/CD pipelines, Agile practices, and SOC 2 compliance frameworks, and cutting infrastructure costs by 35% while improving system availability.I hold all 15 AWS certifications (Gold Jacket), including DevOps Engineer Professional, Solutions Architect Professional, Security Specialty, and Advanced Networking Specialty. I stay close to the technical work — I\'m currently building a real-time weather data platform from scratch in Rust on AWS, which keeps me honest about what\'s actually hard at the infrastructure level.Career highlights:• Founded AWS Resilience Practice — $15M+ revenue, three global regions,$287M active pipeline• Led 70+ person engineering org through Rackspace-to-AWS cloud migration at EmployBridge (35% cost reduction, SOC 2 implementation)• Architected multi-region active/active migration for Fortune 50 CPG manufacturer across AWS, Azure, and GCP• Amazon Bar Raiser — 500+ interviews; authored global Manager Role Guidelines for AWS Professional Services• AWS Gold Jacket recipient — all 15 certifications

Experience

1. Application Modernization and Agentic Development Leader, Aws Professional Services

   Amazon Web Services (AWS)

   Jun 2019 — Present · Dallas, TX, US

   Lead a distributed engineering organization delivering cloud-native solutions for Fortune 500 enterprises.Cloud Operations & Reliability:• Founded AWS Resilience Practice from concept to $15M+ annual revenue across three global regions — authored the business case, secured executive sponsorship, built the team, and established SRE methodologies, chaos engineering frameworks, and incident response playbooks now adopted enterprise-wide• Represented Professional Services on AWS-wide Resilience Task Force, influencing cloud reliability and operational excellence standards across the customer base• Championed DevOps and modern SDLC adoption: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, automated testing, and monitoring/observability standards across 50+ Fortune 500 environments• Architected highly available multi-cloud migration for Fortune 50 CPG manufacturer — multi-region active/active across AWS, Azure, and GCP with cross-cloud observability and chaos testing programTeam Leadership:• Lead author of global Manager Role Guidelines defining performance standards and promotion criteria across AWS Professional Services worldwide• Amazon Bar Raiser: 500+ interviews across all job families

Education

• SMU Cox School of Business

  MBA

  2003 — 2005

Skills

• Architecture
• Integration
• Spring
• Xml
• Database Design
• IT Strategy
• Web Services
• Software Development
• Scrum
• Agile Methodologies
• Software Project Management
• Spring Framework
• Sdlc
• Angularjs
• Solution Architecture
• Agile Project Management
• Java Enterprise Edition
• Enterprise Architecture
• Requirements Analysis
• Data Modeling
• Eclipse
• Soa