Beth Galetti

Leading Amazon's people organization

Beth Galetti is senior vice president of People eXperience and Technology at Amazon, the organization that provides human resources services and technology to the company's workforce. Fortune's profile for its Most Powerful Women list says that workforce exceeds 1.5 million people, and ranked her 78th on its 2025 list. PATH's biography, written earlier, gave a smaller headcount of more than one million employees in 50 countries, a reminder that the figure moves with the company.^[1][2]

Fortune also credits her organization with overseeing key company initiatives, including support for a diverse and inclusive workforce and the rollout of Amazon's full-time return-to-office policy.^[1]

As of August 2026 she was still writing under that title: Amazon's news site carried a first-person account by her, dated August 25, 2026, which a trade report picked up days later.^[4]

From FedEx software developer to HR executive

PATH's biography traces Galetti's early career to nearly two decades in transportation. She began as a software developer at FedEx Express and FedEx Services, then led package tracking and international systems.^[2]

She was chief information officer for FedEx's Latin America and Canada operations from 2005 to 2007 and then chief information officer for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India from 2007 to 2010, based in Brussels. She later became vice president of planning, engineering and operations for airline and ground operations across those regions.^[2]

She joined Amazon in 2013, according to both PATH and Fortune. PATH says her first Amazon role was vice president for worldwide operations and customer service HR, and Fortune says she moved up from there to her current senior vice president post. The shift from IT leader to human resources executive is unusual and shapes how she talks about her work: in 2026 she described her own return to coding.^[1][2][4]

Education and board service

Galetti holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Lehigh University and an MBA from Colorado Technical University.^[1][2]

She joined the board of PATH, the global health nonprofit, in December 2018 and has chaired it since January 2022, also heading its executive committee. PATH also lists her as a board member of the 2018 healthcare partnership formed by Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway to improve employee satisfaction and reduce healthcare costs for US employees.^[2]

Her volunteer work includes Court Appointed Special Advocates in Colorado Springs, Ronald McDonald House in Seattle and Junior Achievement.^[2]

Developing employees: mentoring and skills

Writing on Amazon's news site about a decade after she joined, Galetti described the Amazon Mentoring Program, launched in 2016, as a way of living the leadership principle of striving to be Earth's best employer. Participation grew from 18,800 in 2016 to more than 159,000 in 2022, and the post cites the LIFT mentoring circles started in early 2023 by the Latinos at Amazon group, which had 13 circles and 178 participants at the time.^[3]

According to a trade report, the August 2026 post also sets out Future Ready 2030, a $2.5 billion commitment to prepare at least 50 million people for future work, which includes $1 billion for the Career Choice tuition benefit with a goal of upskilling 500,000 more employees. AI training is free for Amazon employees, and the company pays for one AWS AI certification exam a year.^[4]

AI at work: an executive learns to build

In that August 25, 2026 post, Galetti said she had written more than 100,000 lines of code with AI tools after a gap of about 25 years since her early software work. Her first project, she wrote, was a family calendar app that worked within a couple of hours. She named Kiro, a development tool that plans, writes and tests code from plain-language descriptions, Amazon Quick, a general work assistant, and Aza, an internal assistant for HR questions and transactions.^[4]

She also described an internal contest called Everyone Can Build that drew more than 1,500 participants from her team within weeks. The report notes that the productivity examples, including a process cut from nearly four hours to a one-second check, are self-reported and unaudited, and that the post does not explain how the 100,000-line figure was measured.^[4]

Announcing the 2025 and 2026 cuts

Galetti's name is attached to two large rounds of Amazon corporate job cuts. A trade report says that on October 28, 2025 the company announced about 14,000 corporate job cuts, and that a further 16,000 followed in January 2026, around 30,000 in all.^[4]

Coverage of the January round said she announced the cuts and framed them as part of a longer effort to reduce layers, increase ownership and remove bureaucracy, with the company continuing to hire in strategic areas. She said broad layoffs every few months were not the plan. Affected US employees were given a 90-day window to seek internal roles, plus severance, continued health benefits and job placement support.^[5]

The reaction was not uniformly favorable. Workforce strategist Amanda Goodall criticized the process on January 28, 2026, describing a gradual loss of access and arguing that the cuts were not performance based. Those are her claims, and some employees interviewed said the process felt abrupt.^[5]

Why she matters

Galetti sits at the point where human resources, technology and corporate restructuring meet at the scale of one of the world's largest private employers. Her team's decisions on return-to-office, job reductions, mentoring and AI skills set expectations that other large employers watch closely.^[1][4][5]

Her engineering background informs the unusual public stance of an HR chief who builds software herself and treats AI fluency as a requirement across her organization, while the layoffs she announced are the other half of how that approach is judged.^[2][4][5]

On The Executive List

Beth Galetti is ranked No. 26 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Human Resources Officers discipline. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.