Ash Sayani

Engineering Leadership · AI

Ash Sayani

Software Development Manager, AWS · Amazon ECS

I've spent 20+ years leading engineering teams — from individual contributor through Director, CTO, and VP Engineering, across HealthTech, IoT, Oil & Gas, and cloud infrastructure. Today I'm a Software Development Manager at AWS, leading two teams building Amazon ECS — the software that powers the internet.

I started ashai.ca to write about engineering leadership and AI from the inside — field-tested on real teams and codebases every day, while completing my MSc in AI to sharpen the skills required for the next phase of our development journey. Everything here is learned in the trenches.

Profile

Service Record

AWS
Software Development Manager
XSENSOR
VP Engineering
FLEETBridge
CTO
IRISNDT
Director of Software Development
Enerflex
IT Solutions Architect

Field Notes

ai-leadership
Drive — How I Grow Engineers and the Product Follows

Give engineers work that grows them, the freedom to own it, and a reason it matters — and you get their best. The product follows.

Read → ai-leadership
Three Ways to Work With AI

Every time you open Claude you make a choice you probably don't notice: how much of the work to hand over. There are three ways to work with AI.

Read → claude-code
CLAUDE.local.md: Your Private Layer

CLAUDE.local.md never leaves your machine. Here's how to use it as a personal rule file built from the one source of feedback most engineers ignore — their own PR comments.

Read →
All Field Notes →

Field Intel

01
Rahul (@sairahul1)
20 AI Concepts You Must Understand in 2026

The clearest AI foundations explainer I've found — neural networks through agents, no PhD required. I come back to this when I need to level-set with engineers still building their mental model of how these systems actually work.

02
Cole Medin
Building the AI Layer: Claude Code in Large Codebases

The harness around the model matters more than the model itself. Cole Medin builds Anthropic's full playbook hands-on — CLAUDE.md hierarchy, self-improving hooks, path-scoped skills, subagents for exploration — and the self-improving stop hook alone changes how you think about keeping the AI layer from rotting over time.

03
Anthropic
Claude Code Plugins Directory (anthropics/claude-plugins-official)

Anthropic's official plugin directory — the right starting point before going anywhere else. First thing I did after reading it was check what equivalent exists inside Amazon's internal tooling.

All Field Intel →