Amazon top executive quits to protest employee firings, forfeits $1 million

SEATTLE : A senior Amazon.com Inc. engineer has resigned in solidarity with fired corporate and warehouse workers who protested working conditions at the company.

Tim Bray, a vice president and veteran engineer with the company’s cloud-computing division, said in a post on his personal blog that he quit “in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.”

Bray, who worked in Vancouver, was a distinguished engineer, a coveted title large tech companies award to senior technologists. The decision will likely cost him more than $1 million in loss of salary and unvested Amazon stock, “not to mention the best job I ever had,” he said.