Alexi Varanko

Alexi Varanko is the Vice President of Cloud & Data Transformation Engineering, for the Walt Disney Company. His primary responsibility is to transform the way Disney uses technology to engage customers, support employees, and enable innovation and operation of Disney Experiences across the company (Theme Parks & Resorts, Broadcast Media, Studio, Consumer Products and Interactive Media.) He also leads the Enterprise Cloud Program which was created to accelerate the implementation and adoption of Cloud services as the company standard across the enterprise. In his tenure he has built several platforms to help enable the enterprise to securely and reliably consume different SaaS services.

As the executive sponsor of the Jedi Engineering Training Academy (JETA); he has helped set a vision for the community to curate and develop an internal training program. JETA consists of internal talks from internal teams, notable technology leaders from across the industry, and internal conferences. These talks are held 2-4 times a month across the country and streamed for the rest of the company.

His early experience at Disney included work at Walt Disney Studios where he was instrumental in reinventing the direct-to-consumer experience by helping to build and launch Disney Movies Anywhere — which then evolved into Movies Anywhere. He managed movie production support on-set for Disney live actions films, post-production and sound engineering support on the studio lot for Disney theatrical releases and the underlying infrastructure and systems that support the studio's operations.

Before joining Disney in 2011, Alexi spent over 15 years leading innovative engineering projects that accelerate businesses to realize value faster. He cultivates results-driven, customer and product focused teams.Some of Alexi’s previous companies includerunning his own consulting company, Microsoft, and Experian. In these roles, he leads global organizations across India, Ireland, Singapore, China, Chile, and Mexico.

Born in Portsmouth Virginia, Alexi has lived “up and down” the entire western coast of the U.S and currently resides in Seattle, Washington with his wife and two children. He’s an avid outdoorsman who enjoys photography, surfing, paddle-boarding, and cycling.

Alexi additionally serves on the Customer Advisory Board for:

• Amazon Web Services
• Microsoft Azure
• Hashicorp