Teresa Carlson returns to Microsoft

After more than a decade away, renowned federal IT industry leader Teresa Carlson has rejoined Microsoft.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella created a role as corporate vice president and executive-in-residence for Carlson to return to the company she spent a decade with earlier in her career. She will report to Chris Young, the company’s executive vice president of business development, strategy and ventures and former CEO of McAfee, FedScoop has learned.

Her first day back with Microsoft was May 23.

Carlson comes to the software giant after spending a year as chief growth officer for Splunk. Before that, she spent nearly 11 years with Amazon Web Services, building out the cloud service provider’s global public sector business.

In her time with AWS, she helped the company win a $600 million deal with the CIA to provide classified cloud services to the intelligence community — a contract that cemented AWS as a leader in providing cloud services for highly sensitive government workloads. She also was a fierce advocate for the company to win the Pentagon’s now-defunct Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative (JEDI) cloud contract, which was ultimately awarded to her new company before a long saga of bid protests and its eventual cancellation.

But it was at Microsoft that Carlson first made a name for herself in the federal technology community as vice president of federal sales and operations, spending 10 years with the company.

Carlson in recent weeks also took a board position with Karat, a cloud startup focused on providing interviewing as a service for technical jobs.

Microsoft did not return a request for comment prior to publication.