Description

AWS Solutions is a new organization with ambitions to be a leading provider of business applications, leveraging Amazon’s unique experience and expertise, used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. Our mission is to accelerate our customers’ businesses by delivering intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon’s real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use.

To be successful in this mission we are looking for a VP of UX Design. This leader will form a new design center of excellence including UX design, UX research and design-tech. They will lead a team who can deliver on a unified strategy for building a destination where customers can start by using any one of our capabilities, and over time adopt our full suite of applications. This strategy will need to accommodate the needs of multiple distinct customer segments and flex to support multiple different businesses. To scale and enable rapid development of new features, this leader will need to create a unifying standard and vision for customer experience, while enabling innovation in their teams and with the product teams they work with.

Success in this role is across multiple dimensions starting with the ability to invent and establish a culture of excellence in customer experience across AWS Solutions. This culture is self sustaining and like security, is table stakes in what we build and deliver to customers. They have done this without slowing down feature velocity or introducing undue bureaucracy. The leader and their team will have solved for AI being native to our applications. In fact, they will have invented new UX patterns which escape the patterns of the non-AI world. The experience is so good that customers don’t even know they are using AI. The magic just happens. In all cases, the customer experiences we build are supported by data with a high quality UX research program which informs day-to-day UX and engineering efforts. While delivering this future, this leader has built a top tier UX organization recognized within Amazon as being the gold standard.

We know that a world class user experience will be critical to winning customer trust each day and creating value for customers. We are looking for a VP of Design who can lead this vision, build the muscles we need as a product organization and balance ambition with execution to set us up to succeed. This is a newly created leadership role that will bring together design teams from across the AWS Solutions product portfolio to build a unified design organization.

Key job responsibilities

• Define and drive UX vision and identity for AWS Solutions

• Build UX design mechanisms to enable engineering teams to ship features at high velocity and scale without compromising on usability, accessibility, technical performance, logging and cognitive load for customers

• Solve for AI being native to every customer interaction with our applications, inventing new UX patterns which escape the patterns of the non-AI world

• Go deep on consumer insights, product analytics, and competitive intelligence to identify unseen opportunities and drive product and CX innovation

• Build a high quality UX research program that operates at scale to inform day-to-day UX and engineering efforts

• Evangelize initiatives to diverse audiences in both ad-hoc and formal presentations

• Stay on the cutting edge of what’s new in technology and user experience, identifying and experimenting with new promising tech and interaction patterns

• Inspire, lead, and develop across a diverse team of Designers, Researchers, Prototypers, and Product Managers

• Contribute to the Culture and Community of Design at Amazon

Basic Qualifications

• 20+ years of experience designing complex consumer facing digital products, mobile or web experiences

• 15+ years of experience successfully leading and managing large multi-disciplinary design teams as a manager of managers

• An online portfolio or case study presentation of work demonstrating experience creating innovative work

• Bachelor’s or equivalent degree in Product Design, HCI, Cognitive Psychology or related field or equivalent professional experience within the design field

Preferred Qualifications

• Design operations (Design Ops) experience scaling and growing organizational design through mechanisms, tools, planning, and prioritization

• Strong bias for action, including the ability to juggle multiple priorities and effectively deliver in a fast-paced, dynamic environment

• Ability to context and altitude switch – weigh in on strategic debates, then shift quickly into rolling up your sleeves — ensure work always meets business, product, and customer expectations

• Demonstrated history of acquiring user data (e.g., conducting usability studies, user interviews, contextual inquiry) and using it to make successful decisions

• Experience designing for constantly evolving fields – experience with and curiosity about AI, ML, voice design, physical-spatial design, social design, and start-up design best practices

• Proven track record presenting to and influencing people, from other designers to engineering leaders to senior executive management

• Experience hiring a diverse range of people and job roles (Product Design, Visual Design, Design Ops/Program Management, Research, Front End Engineering, etc) to grow and develop the team’s capabilities and ability to handle a range of user problems

• Fluency in best practices for multi-platform research, product and content design, as well as strong knowledge of usability principles and techniques

• Master’s, PhD, or equivalent professional experience demonstrating a level of subject matter expertise in the field

Amazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.