Last month, Recode reported that Jeff Bezos’s top adviser, Maria Renz, had taken a new role at the company. Now we know who her replacement is.
Jeff Bezos has a new top adviser at Amazon
A Kindle vice president is the CEO’s new “shadow.”
Asa Mathat
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
Jeffrey Helbling, most recently a vice president of the Kindle business, is the new technical adviser to the CEO — otherwise known as Bezos’s “shadow,” according to his LinkedIn bio. Helbling has been with Amazon for five years, having spent the previous 14 years at the consultancy McKinsey & Company.
The “shadow” role is one of the most coveted positions at Amazon, since the executive spends one to two years working by Bezos’s side on a daily basis, and traveling with the CEO, as well. These executives often end up running important businesses inside of Amazon afterward, such as Amazon AWS (Andy Jassy) and Amazon India (Amit Agarwal).
Renz, who held the position before Helbling, was the first woman to serve in this role, and remains the only one as of now. She is currently the vice president of delivery experience at Amazon.
Helbling’s new role was reported earlier on Monday by The Information.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
