Deborah Black

Former Vice President of Engineering at Netflix, Creative Destruction Lab

Deborah Black is the former Vice President of Engineering at Netflix, where she was a member of the Netflix senior leadership team and was responsible for Engineering, Security, Content Delivery, AI/ML, and IT. Prior to Netflix, she served as Vice President, eCommerce Services at Amazon, where she was responsible for the software that enables Amazon’s global businesses, including customer accounts, order contracts and workflows, authentication/authorization, global tax, promotions, shipping, financial integration, and compliance enforcement. These global systems enable Amazon’s businesses – from retail, marketplace, and international expansion, to physical stores and AWS.

Deborah is a former Corporate Vice President at Microsoft where she held a variety of positions within the Windows Division, building operating systems and back office products, leading strategic planning, and managing the P&L for the Windows Business Desktop. She began her career at Bell Northern Research, where she focused on distributed systems research. She led the design and development of distributed operating system components, including the name server, file server, event manager, and asynchronous communication protocols.

Deborah currently serves as a board director at ServiceNow, an enterprise software company driving digital transformation through AI.

Deborah holds a BS and MSE in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan and served on the university’s Computer Science and Engineering School National Advisory Board for a decade.