Zach Carlile

About Zach Carlile

Strategic finance leader with experience driving financial operations and enabling go-to-market success in AI and compute-intensive environments. Expertise in budgeting, forecasting, and capital allocation for large-scale AI infrastructure, including inference capacity planning and compute costs. Skilled in collaborating with cross-functional teams to drive financial strategies for product development, go-to-market initiatives, and compute/infrastructure planning.

Experience

1. Head of Finance, Alexa Ai

   Amazon

   Jan 2024 — Present · Seattle, WA, US

   Directed and supervised end-to-end operations of the Alexa AI Finance department including P&L management, month-end close, product strategy, and headcount planning-Served as executive finance partner to product, applied science, and engineering VP leadership, driving multi-year investment strategy, long-range planning, and operating decisions grounded in unit economics, customer value, and contribution margin-Led financial strategy for a multi-billion AWS compute budget, developing multi-year models that translated LLM performance and traffic into inference demand, enabling long-range capacity/compute planning-Established and led Alexa’s weekly AWS compute and inference capacity review, aligning product, science, and AWS leadership on forecasts, efficiency roadmaps, and capacity/compute allocation decisions-Partnered with GTM and Product leadership to design tiered subscription offerings, aligning feature inclusion and pricing with cost structure and profitability, including edge compute tradeoffs-Collaborated with Science, Engineering, and Product leaders to define annual strategic business goals for the organization-Built and managed a team of high performing Finance Managers and Senior Financial Analysts

Education

• UW Foster School of Business

  Master of Professional Accounting, Audit and Assurance

  2012 — 2013

• University of Washington

  Bachelor's degree, Accounting

  2008 — 2012