Amir Satvat

Amir Satvat is an American business executive who has been a business development director at Tencent Games since 2023. He is known for his volunteer efforts in helping jobseekers and laid-off workers find positions in the video game industry.

His efforts in helping jobseekers began in November 2022 on his LinkedIn page, as a spreadsheet of video game job listings scraped from the web. This has since expanded to become a wider network of 14 job-seeking resources and support across multiple platforms. His community's efforts have helped over 3,500 people find work in the industry.

Early life

Amir Satvat was born on April 1, 1982, to Ashraf Owlia Satvat and Behzad Satvat of Avon, Connecticut. Satvat grew up in Farmington, Connecticut, where he continues to live with his family and work remotely from. He graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School in 2000 and went on to receive a bachelor's degree in finance from Boston College. Satvat spent five years in graduate school to pursue three master's degrees; a degree in biotechnology from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Business Administration in healthcare administration from the Wharton School, and a Master of Public Administration in health policy from New York University. Satvat married Jessica Ellen Leight on April 13, 2013, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, officiated by Leight's father.

Professional career

Having aspired to work on video games since the age of four, Satvat began applying for roles in the video game industry after graduating from college. While positions were available at the time, they were mostly based on the West Coast, and Satvat was not willing to leave his family and friends in the New England area, which he has described as the "only thing that trumped games".

While continuing to seek a career in video games, Satvat spent 15 years working in other fields, including as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs, along with various business development, strategy and operations roles at Dell EMC, VMware, and Veeam. He joined Amazon Inc. in 2019 as a chief operating officer in their Amazon Web Services cloud sales center. A year later, Satvat landed his first role in the game industry, after transferring into Prime Gaming as a business development lead. He later became a principal publishing producer with Amazon Games' Montreal studio. In August 2023, he left Amazon to join Tencent Games as a business development director.

Satvat began his efforts helping others seek jobs in November 2022 after a Thanksgiving dinner, where he heard from friends who had received layoff notices just before the holiday and wanted an easier way to search for jobs. Realizing he could leverage his skills in spreadsheet macros and web scraping to help, Satvat compiled a spreadsheet containing hundreds of job listings and posted it to his LinkedIn page. To simplify the process for jobseekers, the listings are publicly accessible through a Google Sheet, where they are broken down into 20 common categories and automatically updated each month. The spreadsheet has since grown to include over 15,000 postings as of September 2024.

Satvat's efforts expanded to become Amir Satvat's Games Community, which he maintains with a group of volunteers. They now operate a wider network of 14 job-seeking resources and support across multiple platforms, which include job boards and mentorship programs.

In addition to his role at Tencent, Satvat is a member of the advisory network at Vivrato, a strategic advisory organization for the games industry founded by Adam Boyes. He also serves as a special advisor to the Zero Abuse Project, an organization dedicated to ending child abuse through education and advocacy. His Games Community participates annually in Gamers for CHOC, a fundraising campaign supporting the Children's Hospital of Orange County.

Recognition

Satvat was presented with the inaugural Game Changer Award at the Game Awards 2024, a new accolade introduced to recognize individuals who have had a positive impact on the game industry. Many considered Satvat's emotional acceptance speech the highlight of the event. Some viewers suggested Satvat's role at Tencent made him "part of the problem" with layoffs and criticized the ceremony's failure to mention it. Four days after the show, Satvat said he had received "countless hateful messages", including antisemitic comments directed at his wife. He further stated that he has never laid off workers nor worked on "mergers and acquisitions at Tencent or Amazon".

In 2025, Satvat received the Giving Award from Games for Change, an honor recognizing individuals, companies, or organizations making meaningful contributions to the community through initiatives such as fundraising, scholarships, and career support. That same year, Amir Satvat's Games Community was named an official Industry and Media Partner of the Game Developers Conference, contributing 240 Expo Passes valued at over $100,000 to support jobseekers. His community was recognized as the largest grassroots career support initiative in the video game industry through its inclusion in the Gamescom Cares program.

Since 2023, Satvat has been recognized as a LinkedIn Top Voice in Video Games, an honor awarded to members whose content fosters sustained engagement and community impact.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Satvat, Amir
Amazon (company) people
American Internet celebrities
American people in the video game industry
American technology executives
Boston College alumni
The Game Awards winners
Goldman Sachs people
Loomis Chaffee School alumni
New York University alumni
People from Farmington, Connecticut
Tencent people
University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Wharton School alumni
1982 births
Living people