POLITICO ‘That’s where we get the leg up’: How former government officials boost Amazon’s cloud computing unit Amazon Web Services is snapping up former government officials who can help them gain access to lucrative federal contracts. Amazon employs more than 1 million people overall, after adding 500,000 new jobs last year alone. | Steven Senne/AP Photo Link Copied Amazon’s massive cloud-computing unit is aggressively recruiting U.S. government officials as it pushes to make itself essential to branches such as the military and the intelligence community, a POLITICO analysis has found. Since 2018, Amazon Web Services has hired at least 66 former government officials with acquisition, procurement or technology adoption experience, most hired directly away from government posts and more than half of them from the Defense Department. That’s a small portion of AWS’ tens of thousands of employees, but a particularly key group to its federal business. Other AWS hires have come from