James Gosling, who invented the Java programming language, is joining Amazon Web Services as a distinguished engineer.

Gosling's status at Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) is mysterious. He describes his position on his LinkedIn profile this way: "Now I'm wandering around at Amazon Web Services."

Most recently, Gosling was at Liquid Robotics, beginning in 2011, where he worked on ocean-going robots and housing their data in the cloud, according to his LinkedIn Profile.

He worked as a software engineer at Google for six months in 2011, describing his status there on LinkedIn as "free-floating curmudgeon."

But he spent the bulk of his career at Sun Microsystems, 1984-2010, where he developed the Java programming language. Released in 1995, Java was designed as a "write once run anywhere" language, able to run on all supported platforms without needing recompilation. More than 20 years later, Java is still the second-most-in-demand programming languagefor people hiring programmers, driven largely by demand for Android developers, according to the Coding Dojo Blog.

Gosling left Sun in 2010 soon after the company was acquired by Oracle. In a 2010 interview with eWeek, Gosling said his reasons for leaving included a pay cut, reduced authority, a sense that Oracle was "ethically challenged," clashing corporate culture and that Oracle simply wanted him to be the public face of Java and nothing more, a role he told eWeek he was temperamentally unsuited to.

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AWS CTO Werner Vogels tweeted about Gosling's new position Monday:

The link points to a Facebook post by Gosling, dated Monday 8:00 a.m.: "It's time for a change. I'm leaving Boeing Defense (nee Liquid Robotics), with many fond memories. Today I start a new Adventure at Amazon Web Services."

Amazon confirmed it hired Gosling and declined to comment further.

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— Mitch Wagner Editor, Enterprise Cloud News