Mark Bolz is Sr. Director Advanced Modeling, Simulation, Serious Gaming recently rejoining Microsoft from Amazon Web Services (AWS). At AWS, Mark was a Senior Technical Product Manager for RDS and Aurora.

Before joining AWS, Mark was a Principal Software Engineering Manager with the Microsoft Azure Data Group, working on open-source database services. Mark was one of Studio Alpha's founders in the Azure Data Group, winning a wargaming prototype for the United States Marine Corps. During his 12 years at Microsoft, he managed XBOX, Surface, and PC Devices data platforms. He was a product planner for SQL Server and was on the customer success engineering team for HDInsight. Before joining Microsoft, Mark founded Confluent Data Systems, a data analytics company. He began his career and as an armor crewman and armor officer with the United States Marine Corps. Mark earned a BA from Washington State University and a Master of Science in Database Technologies from Regis University.