Principal Design Lead, AWS Brand & Creative

Amazon • Seattle, WA

5d • $167,700 - $226,900 • Onsite

About The Position

AWS is looking for a Principal Design Lead to serve as a design authority across our brand ecosystem. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on raising the bar for design quality, consistency, and strategic impact across everything we make, say, and do — from marketing campaigns and events to product experiences and developer touchpoints.

You are a systems thinker with deep design craft, operating at the intersection of brand strategy, design systems, and production reality. You won’t manage a team — you will influence and collaborate with many of them. Your role is to raise the bar, champion coherence, and ensure our design language scales gracefully across AWS’s complex, multi-audience ecosystem.

This role requires someone who can hold both the 30,000-foot strategic view and the pixel-level craft conversation simultaneously — moving fluidly between executive presentations, design reviews, production workflows, and hands-on creative direction.

Requirements

• 8+ years of design experience
• Demonstrated experience building or evolving design systems in complex, multi-product or multi-audience ecosystems (technology sector required)
• Proven track record of influencing design quality and strategic outcomes across organizational boundaries without direct management authority
• Deep expertise across brand design, marketing design, and product/UX design — with fluency in how these disciplines intersect
• Portfolio demonstrating systems thinking, visual craft, and strategic design leadership

Nice To Haves

• Experience in B2B, digital advertising, and ad-tech products/services
• Track record in global brand programs with execution across multiple geographies and cultural contexts
• Familiarity with design token systems, component libraries, and how brand systems integrate with engineering frameworks
• Experience with data-informed design practices — A/B testing, brand tracking, experience metrics — balanced with high creative judgment
• Understanding of AI-assisted design workflows and emerging production technologies
• Experience influencing product design or developer experience design from a brand/marketing lens
• Background in or strong affinity for cloud computing, infrastructure services, or developer tools

Responsibilities

• Craft the strategic vision for the AWS design system – working collaboratively with leaders across marketing, product, events, and developer experiences to bring it to life.
• Establish design principles, patterns, and governance that flex across diverse surface areas without becoming rigid or generic
• Champion the “Make, Say, Do” framework — ensuring design consistency not just in what we create, but how we communicate and how our products behave
• Serve as the senior design voice in cross-functional forums, bringing clarity and craft to strategic conversations
• Conduct design reviews and provide actionable, elevating feedback to teams across the organization — without owning their work directly
• Influence creative direction across paid media, web, content, events, and product surfaces through expertise and relationships, not authority
• Establish and evangelize quality benchmarks that push teams beyond “good enough” toward exceptional
• Provide design guidance and thought partnership to multiple teams spanning brand, marketing, product, and developer experience — without direct management authority
• Build trust-based relationships with design, product, and engineering leaders to align on shared principles
• Navigate ambiguity across a large, matrixed organization — identifying where design coherence matters most and investing influence accordingly
• Partner with regional and global teams to ensure design standards translate effectively across geographies, languages, and cultural contexts
• Ground design decisions in production reality — understanding constraints and opportunities across digital marketing, web platforms, video, print, events (re:Invent, Summits), and emerging channels
• Advocate for scalable design solutions that work at velocity without sacrificing craft
• Inform tooling, templates, and automation strategies that enable production teams to execute at brand standard
• Use data and performance insights to inform design decisions while balancing with high judgment and creative intuition
• Define measurement frameworks for design effectiveness that go beyond click-through rates to include brand perception, consistency, and experience quality
• Model how to interrogate data critically without letting it override creative conviction

Benefits

• health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage)
• 401(k) matching
• paid time off
• parental leave
• sign-on payments
• restricted stock units (RSUs)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed