Stanford University
 
Jeff Wilke

Jeff Wilke

Advisory Group

Chairman, Re:Build Manufacturing

Jeff Wilke retired as Amazon’s CEO Worldwide Consumer in February 2021. During his more than 21 years as a corporate officer, he led Amazon’s retail and third-party stores, operations, marketing, Prime, and technology teams. Jeff joined Amazon in 1999 to lead the buildout of global operations, and his operations team created the infrastructure and technology that led directly to Amazon Prime. Jeff led teams that launched Prime Video, Prime Now, Prime Day, Amazon Fashion, and many other innovations that are now part of the Amazon customer experience. Jeff also oversaw Amazon’s acquisition and integration of Whole Foods Market. He helped create Amazon’s corporate culture, processes, and mechanisms, including Amazon’s Leadership Principles, which codified the company’s unique DNA for generations of leaders. He brought to Amazon a playbook with principles and processes from manufacturing, including Lean and Six Sigma, and corporate processes such as the HR mechanisms that shaped how Amazon evaluated and grew talent. 

Jeff is chairman and co-founder of Re:Build Manufacturing, a private company that aims to integrate new technologies with conventional manufacturing businesses to accelerate their growth and improve performance. Over the coming decades, the company expects to create new U.S. factories and thousands of new U.S. manufacturing jobs. 

Prior to Amazon, he was vice president and general manager of pharmaceutical fine chemicals at AlliedSignal (now Honeywell). He spent the preceding six years in a variety of operations and general management assignments in the chemical, polymer, and electronics industries. He began his working career writing code and managing software development projects at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). 

Jeff is a 1993 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Leaders for Global Operations program, where he earned an MBA and an S.M. in chemical engineering. He also holds a BSE degree in chemical engineering, summa cum laude, from Princeton University. He served as the chairman of the governing board for MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations program from 2010 through 2020. Jeff was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He spent many evenings as a teenager writing code, and he currently serves on the board of Code.org.

Stanford University