New Relic Picks an AWS Veteran to Watch Over the Watchers

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New Relic, which sells software that lets engineers see what their applications are doing, has a new person watching the company itself. On October 1, 2026, it named Nandini Ramani chief executive officer and a member of its board, effective immediately. She succeeds Ashan Willy, who will stay on as an adviser to the board.

Hired straight out of the same field

Ramani comes to the job from a very similar one. At Amazon Web Services she led a core portfolio covering observability, search and compliance, including what the company called the agentic transformation of those services. Before that she held senior engineering and product roles at X, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. In other words, the board did not hire a generalist who will need a glossary; it hired someone who already speaks fluent telemetry.

In her first statement, Ramani said engineers need observability tools they can trust implicitly, and argued that AI is making application architectures more complex. New Relic's owners were quick to endorse the choice. Brian Decker, co-chief investment officer at Francisco Partners, said she brings the right mix of technical depth and enterprise leadership. Art Heidrich, a partner at TPG, pointed to her experience running mission-critical observability and search platforms and called her the right person to speed up product innovation and deepen the company's enterprise presence.

A first week with a stage

The timing gave the new chief an immediate spotlight. The appointment came as customer adoption of New Relic's AI-powered products keeps growing, although no figures were shared, and just days before the company's flagship New Relic Now event on October 6, where it planned to present new observability products and its roadmap. Most new CEOs get a quiet first week to learn names. Ramani got a keynote calendar, which is one way to find out quickly whether the leadership team trusts its own dashboards.