Square hires Alyssa Henry, VP of storage services for Amazon Web Services, in latest move to construct staff with executives from prominent web and Silicon Valley firms.

Square, a corporation that gives a system to allow local merchants to take mastercard payments using smartphones and tablets, has lured Amazon Web Services VP of storage services, Alyssa Henry, far from Amazon to become its lead engineer.

Henry formerly had responsibility for not just Amazon’s popular S3 storage service but in addition Amazon Elastic Block Store, Glacier, AWS Storage Gateway and AWS Import/Export services. She held the placement for 3 years and 10 months.

Henry joined the team that created S3 not up to a year after its initial launch and have become its first general manager with responsibility for its operation and management of it as a product. That made her the top of a profit and loss unit and a head of engineering for an enormous product inside Amazon.

That move followed a chain of posts, combined with rapid moves up the company software development ladder, at Amazon and before that, Microsoft, in response to her posted job history at LinkedIn.com.

[Like to learn more about how vigorously Amazon promotes its storage services? See Amazon Cuts Cloud Storage Prices, Adds Server Instances.]

Henry will lead the engineering team for Square’s infrastructure and payments platform, which processes tens of billions of bucks in payments a year.

“Making technology simple is a fun challenge as it requires tackling massive complexity,” Henry said in an announcement from Square. “I’ve spent the last 7 years building simple, reliable, and price-effective services that help entrepreneurs scale their business. Local sellers deserve access to a similar tools and opportunities to grow,” she said. Square also helps local merchants of artisan goods installed a web-based storefront on its platform and using its retailing systems.

Prior to AWS, Alyssa was Amazon.com’s director of software development for ordering. She had responsibility for ordering workflow software and databases, which reflected 12 years of expertise at Microsoft engaged on databases, data access, and internal customer relationship management software in a considerable number of roles.

According to LinkedIn, Henry didn’t start off as a developer for online services but quickly made a move in that direction. She started as a Cobol developer for Safeco Insurance, but promptly taught herself Microsoft C++, then was tapped to construct the customer interface for Safeco services.

She is the most recent in a sequence of high profile hires from Silicon Valley companies that the San Francisco-based Square was making to raised position itself as a market leader. They include: Francoise Brougher as a business lead from Google and Gokul Rajaram as a product lead from Facebook. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar came from Salesforce. Jesse Dorogusker, hardware lead, came from Apple; Ricardo Reyes, brand lead, came from Tesla. As well, General Counsel Dana Wagner was hired from Google.

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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio

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