John Rivera-Dirks

About

John Rivera-Dirks is a visiting fellow focused on the new US-India program at Hoover.

Rivera-Dirks has had a 20-year career working in tech in both the public sector and the private sector, at Apple, Microsoft, and most recently Amazon. He’s held a variety of positions managing enterprise customers and partners, leading teams, and launching and growing business lines to produce hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

His career started at Apple after his graduation from Williams College in 1999 with a BA in economics and political science. Rivera-Dirks then went to Columbia University, New York, to earn his MBA. After Columbia, he joined the United States Foreign Service and was assigned to New Delhi, India, where he served for three years as senior advisor and chief of staff to the US ambassador, David Mulford. His motivation for going into government service was to give back to his country, especially after the events of 9/11.

Rivera-Dirks married and returned to the private sector in 2008. He joined Microsoft and relocated to Seattle, Washington, where he’s lived for the past 13 years. He held several positions at Microsoft over eight years, launching three versions of the Windows operating system, the Surface and OEM devices, and cloud management solutions and services. In 2016, he was hired by Amazon to work on the then new product called Alexa, where he led content licensing partnerships to build-out Alexa’s “knowledge graph.” He was then recruited into Amazon Web Services to manage enterprise partnerships and customers digitally transforming through the AWS cloud.