Formerly head of DDaT skills across government, Ellis has taken on public sector-focused post at cloud heavyweight

Credit: GDS/Crown Copyright

Former Home Office and Government Digital Service senior manager Holly Ellis has joined the UK and Ireland business of Amazon Web Services.

Ellis most recently spent almost a year at the Department for International Trade, where she served as director of digital, data, and technology. Prior to this, she was director of capability for DDaT at GDS – a role which covered the recruitment and advancement of tech and digital skills across government.

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She first joined the civil service in January 2016, and held two senior digital roles during a 15-month spell at the Home Office.

She has now joined the public cloud giant in a role in which she will teams of technical architects working across the education, healthcare, local government, and non-profit sectors.

AWS indicated that her duties will not include anything that could represent a breach of the Business Appointment Rules for Civil Servants – a framework that is designed to ensure that, once they leave government, officials do not “improperly exploit privileged access to contacts… or sensitive information”.

Ellis’s appointment is not the first time AWS has recruited a senior Whitehall digital figure; last year the cloud company hired former government chief technology officer and national technology adviser Liam Maxwell as its director of government transformation.