Amazon (NASDQ: AMZN) has recently hired a high-ranking airline executive and two former officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), according to their LinkedIn pages.
Kenji Hashimoto, who spent nearly 22 years at American Airlines, began his first day Monday as Amazon’s vice president of North American sort centers and planning. Sort centers are smaller facilities than fulfillment centers where orders are sorted by final destination and consolidated onto trucks for faster delivery.
Hashimoto previously was senior vice president of finance and corporate development at American. He held a series of executive positions at the world’s largest airline, including a stint as president of cargo.
“Amazon hires based on the need for skills to create a business or scale a business unit. Amazon surgically identifies people with the skills they need and then they go after them,” Brittain Ladd, a former Amazon executive involved in the company’s cross-border, supply chain and grocery strategy, told FreightWaves.
Christa Brzozowsk, who served as deputy assistant secretary for foreign investment and trade policy at DHS, this month joined Amazon as senior manager of public policy, based in Washington. In her role at DHS, she assisted in reviewing foreign investments for national security implications and dealt with a range of issues, including e-commerce, import-export compliance and data security.
She previously served as trade counselor to the DHS secretary during the Obama administration. Prior to that, she spent two and a half years as director of global supply chain security in the White House, serving on the National Security Council.
Amazon also plucked Travis Skinner from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where he headed trade modernization for the past six months. He spent nearly three years prior to that as a senior counselor to the commissioner of Customs and the DHS secretary. The 16-year Customs veteran also was a staff attorney and spent time helping manage cargo security programs.
In February, Amazon hired former Sony executive and Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins to lead Prime Video and its television and movie studios.
Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.
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