Joshua Dean Get in touch
Product Management — Networking & Infrastructure

Joshua Dean

Senior Product Manager, Technical — AWS Direct Connect

Product manager for AWS Direct Connect, the private-connectivity service behind a large share of enterprise traffic into AWS. Nine years at AWS across support, solutions architecture, and product, all of it in networking and infrastructure. Led the launches that brought BGP-level observability to Direct Connect customers, and led the custom network builds connecting the largest AI labs’ training clusters — more than 500,000 GPUs and counting. Hands-on with the tools I product: I run Tailscale for my own projects and lab networking.

Seattle, WA josh.dean60@gmail.com (360) 554-9672 resume.thedeans.info linkedin.com/in/josh-dean-aws
$1B+
Annual Direct Connect revenue under roadmap ownership
595 Tbps
Bespoke AI connectivity across 3 frontier labs
500K+
GPUs connected for frontier AI training clusters

Experience

Amazon Web Services
Seattle, WA · 2016 — Present

Senior Product Manager, Technical — Direct Connect

Aug 2024 – Present
  • Own the roadmap for Direct Connect, a $1B+ service used by 10,000+ enterprises for private connectivity into AWS.
  • Product lead for a bespoke 150 Tbps network build for a top AI foundation-model company. Cut their connectivity cost roughly 90% versus the standard offering and got them to production 60% faster. That build became the template: the same connectivity model now spans 595 Tbps across three frontier AI labs, supporting training clusters of 300,000+ GPUs.
  • Launched BGP route visibility for Direct Connect virtual interfaces: accepted and advertised routes with AS path and community values, in-console and via API, across all commercial and China regions. Gave network operators the view they previously only got by opening support cases or polling APIs.
  • Launched CloudWatch metrics for Direct Connect VIF BGP health and prefix counts — VirtualInterfaceBgpStatus, PrefixesAccepted, PrefixesAdvertised — replacing manual API polling and custom Lambda workarounds with alarms. Proactive monitoring for silent route withdrawals and prefix limits before a session drops.
  • Presented “Hybrid connectivity at scale: A deep dive into AWS Direct Connect” (NET403) at AWS re:Invent 2025.
  • Set pricing and packaging based on direct discovery with Fortune 500 customers, several with $100M+ annual cloud spend; present roadmap and business reviews to AWS VPs, with my calls shaping decisions on $500M+ in annual revenue.

Senior Partner Solutions Architect

Apr 2020 – Aug 2024
  • Product strategy for the AWS side of SASE, zero-trust, and multi-cloud networking partnerships: built the reference architectures 500+ enterprises deployed, and ran joint go-to-market with major security and networking ISVs from design through partner enablement.
  • Led technical enablement for partners, cutting integration timelines for shared customers and accelerating time-to-market for joint solutions.

Cloud Support Engineering — Associate through Senior

Jun 2016 – Apr 2020
  • Promoted four times in four years. Ended as the escalation point for enterprise networking and virtualization cases.
  • Wrote troubleshooting runbooks still in use by 1,000+ support engineers worldwide; built automation that cut resolution time on connectivity cases; mentored 20+ engineers.

Skills

Networking

High-throughput connectivity for AI/ML training, hybrid cloud, BGP, MPLS, enterprise WAN, overlay networking (Tailscale/WireGuard, SASE, zero-trust)

Observability

CloudWatch metrics and alarms, BGP telemetry, network health monitoring, SLOs and performance commitments

Cloud

IaaS, EC2, virtualization, containers, storage, server hardware

Product

Roadmap ownership, pricing, competitive analysis, customer discovery, exec communication

Hands-on

Python, Bash, REST APIs, CloudFormation, Git, CI/CD

Credentials

Certifications

  • AWS Certified Advanced Networking — Specialty
  • Zscaler Technical Associate

Education

B.S., Information Technology
Western Governors University

Earlier

Cloud Services Engineer, Green House Data — Hybrid cloud deployments (VMware, Hyper-V) and carrier-grade MPLS networks.
Operations Technician, FiberCloud — Data center and network operations; cut incident response time 25%.