La-Chun Lindsay – Director of Infrastructure Operations, Amazon Web Services
La-Chun Lindsay is an American aerospace engineer who was the first woman to become Managing Director of Wales’ largest industrial company, GE Aviation Wales. During her first 2 years La-Chun increased women’s representation on the shop floor from 1% to 13%.
La-Chun is also a strong advocate for the LGBTQ+ community and founded the Wales branch of the GLBTA GE Aviation Alliance, which was developed to attract, develop, and retain gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees within the company.
La-Chun was born and raised in Rock Hill, South Carolina. She returned to US in 2018 and has recently taken up a new role as the Director of Infrastructure Operations at Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments.
In addition to her successful career, La-Chun has been appointed by Welsh Government to become one of the first three envoys to promote Wales to countries abroad. This forms part of the Welsh Government’s International Strategy, a key feature of which is to raise the profile of the nation around the world.
La-Chun strongly feels that a good workplace should allow everybody to flourish, develop and be the best they can be and that this is best accomplished when everyone can bring their “whole” self to work.
La-Chun’s career journey
Born and raised in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Le-Chun attended Clemson University and graduated in 1995 with a B.S. degree in ceramic engineering. She also has three honorary doctorates from Cardiff University, the University of South Wales and Swansea University.
After graduating Clemson University, La-Chun held a variety of leadership, engineering and research & development roles with the US Government and private companies. She then joined General Electric (GE) Quartz in October 1997 where she held roles as process engineer, tubing green belt, supplier quality black belt and manager of the Raw Material Processing Plant.
She joined GE’s Corporate Audit Staff (CAS) in September 2000, performing and leading financial, regulatory, compliance, acquisition, disposition and commercial audits. Her final role on CAS was executive audit manager of global compliance, Latin America and commercial excellence.
In May 2007, La-Chun joined GE Capital as the vice president of Commercial Distribution Finance’s Field Services Group, leading a team of 400 remote employees.
In January 2014, she joined GE Aviation as Plant Leader of Lynn Assembly, Test and Overhaul where she led a team of 400 employees in producing and developing engines for GE Aviation’s military and commercial customers.
In April 2015, La-Chun became the Managing Director of GE Aviation Wales before moving back to the US in 2018.
Before joining Amazon Web Services in June 2020, La-Chun was GE Aviation’s executive leader for Customer Fulfilment. She led a team of data scientists, architects and engineers working on improving GE Aviation’s on-time delivery performance.