Cogna appoints Amazon AI engineering leader Sam Ng as Chief Technology Officer to lead next phase of platform development
Sam Ng brings nearly 20 years of engineering leadership experience at startups and public companies spanning Microsoft, Google, Amazon and more. His career has been defined by building high-performance teams and shipping products at scale, from compiler toolchains and cloud platforms to AI infrastructure and consumer hardware.
Most recently at Amazon, Ng led two major engineering programmes. In Amazon AI, his teams owned the language, compiler, framework, and tooling used to build training and inference workloads running on Amazon’s custom Trainium and Inferentia chips. He also led a 300-person engineering organisation at Kindle, where he built two zero-to-one devices: Kindle Scribe, the first large-format Kindle with writing and notetaking, and Kindle Colorsoft, the first Kindle with a colour display.
Before Amazon, Ng served as Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, where he led teams across three distinct domains: building Knowledge Worker tools in G Suite, launching Cloud Run for Anthos v1 in GCP Serverless, and developing consumer devices at Nest. Prior to Google, he spent four years at GoDaddy, rising from Director to VP of Engineering, where he ran the Global Platform Division building globally scalable, regionally customizable platforms serving over 60 million domain names and taking the company through a highly successful IPO. He began his career at Microsoft, where he spent nearly eight years working on the C# compiler and building the Windows Azure Media Services team from scratch.
At Cogna, Ng will lead the engineering organisation, driving the technical vision for the company’s AI platform as it scales to meet growing demand from customers in water, gas, construction, and other critical industries.
“Sam is a rare combination of deep technical ability and proven leadership at the highest levels of the industry. His experience building AI infrastructure at Amazon and scaling platform teams at Google and Microsoft makes him the ideal person to lead our engineering organisation into its next chapter,” said Ben Peters, CEO and Co-founder of Cogna.
Ng’s appointment comes as Cogna continues to expand internationally, building on strong customer traction and growing demand for AI-powered tools in industries where operational complexity is highest.
