Director, Frontier AI Sales, AWS Startups

Amazon•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a complete set of cloud services that enable all companies, from startups to enterprises, to run virtually everything in the cloud. The Frontier startup segment represents one of the most strategically important and rapidly growing areas of AWS, with these customers driving the future of AI and becoming tomorrow's enterprise leaders. As AWS continues to lead in the GenAI and Agentic space, we seek a Director of Frontier Sales to own, operate, and define strategy for the global AI startup business. This role is the single-threaded leader (STL) for substantial revenue driven by AI/ML, GenAI, and Agentic startup customers worldwide, with ambitious multi-year growth targets. Role Overview You will be responsible for setting the vision, strategic direction, plan, and goals to win the best AI startups globally. This includes direct responsibility for NAMER GenAI sales teams and support for all global GenAI teams across EMEA, APAC, and LATAM within the Startups organization. You will lead a large, matrixed global organization spanning Sales, Solution Architects, Business Development, and Go-To-Market functions across multiple countries and locations. Unlike traditional sales leadership roles, this position requires single-threaded ownership of an entire market segment with substantial revenue responsibility, direct influence on AWS product strategy through customer feedback, and engagement at the highest levels of AWS and Amazon. Additionally, proficiency in managing direct and matrixed global resources is required, and expertise in emerging AI technologies with an ability to engage technical founders.

Requirements

15+ years of technology-related sales or business development experience
8+ years of sales leadership experience managing leaders of leaders
Proven track record building and scaling successful global sales organizations
Deep expertise in the AI/ML and GenAI startup ecosystem, including understanding of foundation models, training infrastructure, and inference workloads
Experience structuring and closing complex, multi-year deals
Demonstrated ability to engage and influence C-suite executives and board members
Strong relationships with top-tier venture capital firms and startup accelerators
Experience managing matrixed, globally distributed teams across multiple job families
Exceptional strategic thinking and ability to operate in highly ambiguous, fast-moving environments
Outstanding verbal and written communication skills with ability to engage technical and business audiences
BA/BS degree required

Nice To Haves

MBA/MA/MS degree in relevant field
Previous experience at a leading technology company with cloud expertise
Technical background in engineering, computer science, or AI/ML
History of working for or selling to tech startups, particularly in the AI/ML space
Experience with AWS services, particularly SageMaker, Bedrock, EC2, and GPU infrastructure
Proven ability to influence product roadmaps and drive cross-functional initiatives
Experience managing substantial P&L responsibility
Established relationships with Tier 1 venture capital firms
Understanding of GenAI technology stack, including transformers, diffusion models, and agentic AI

Responsibilities

Drive significant annual revenue with strong YoY growth for the Startup segment.
Own relationships with top-tier AI startups building frontier AI technologies across foundation models, agentic AI, and vertical AI applications.
Execute complex, high-value opportunities with sophisticated AI startups, navigating technical, commercial, competitive, and partnership elements simultaneously.
Meet AWS-wide AI revenue targets while building a pipeline of future Enterprise customers.
Navigate highly competitive environments to secure adoption of emerging startups
Cultivate and maintain strategic relationships with top-tier venture capital firms and leading accelerators.
Engage directly with AWS executive leadership and customer C-suite executives.
Serve as the voice of AI startup customers to AWS service teams, influencing product roadmaps and go-to-market strategies.
Lead and develop a globally distributed team across NAMER, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM
Manage workforce planning and resource allocation globally across multiple countries and locations
Build and scale high-performing teams spanning multiple job families and functions
Establish consistent performance metrics and development paths across diverse technical and sales skillsets
Coordinate with AWS Partner Organization (APO) on co-sell, sell-with, and sell-to approaches
Own feedback loops to service teams on customer requirements for frontier AI workloads