Indian American engineering innovator and Microsoft Teams founder and engineering innovator Jigar Thakkar has joined Amazon Web Services to lead its new AI-powered digital workspace Quick Suite product.
During his 19-year tenure at Microsoft, Thakkar built large-scale products and served in various leadership positions in Microsoft Teams, Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Bing, Windows and MSN divisions.
As the new vice president of Amazon Quick Suite, Thakkar will lead AWS’ team in building out a portfolio of agentic applications and services designed for business users, Amazon stated.
“Jigar brings over 25 years of experience driving digital transformation and engineering excellence across global financial services and major technology platforms,” it stated. “He spent nearly 20 years at Microsoft, where he was the founding engineering leader for Microsoft Teams.”
Thakkar joined Microsoft in 1999 and quickly became a software development lead for Microsoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. He spent five years as a principal development manager for Windows Mobile Devices team, then spent several years in various top engineering roles, according to his LinkedIn profile. In 2015, Thakkar became Microsoft’s engineering leader and founding member of Microsoft Teams.
On LinkedIn, Thakkar said that he “developed Microsoft Teams product and engineering team from scratch and launched the beta within 18 months.”
“I led a team of over 400 engineers in Bellevue WA, Palo Alto CA, Bangalore India, Stockholm Sweden and Prague Czech Republic,” Thakkar said, referring to Microsoft Teams. Responsibilities included product architecture as well as the “entire engineering team [and] site reliability engineering,” he wrote.
In 2017, he was promoted to corporate vice president of Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business engineering. He left Microsoft in 2018 to become the CTO and head of engineering for financial services giant MSCI Inc.
At MSCI, Thakkar led the technology and data functions for all product lines and enterprise operations at MSCI, overseeing a global team of approximately 4,000 technologists, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Amazon Quick Suite, the company’s new AI-powered digital workspace for AWS is designed to help businesses and users find insights, automate tasks, and take actions across enterprise applications.
Launched in October, it unifies several AI capabilities into a single experience, stemming from the integration of Amazon Q Business and Amazon Quick Sight.
Prior to joining MSCI, he served as Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, leading software engineering for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business.
He holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Science in Electronics Engineering from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in India.