Software Development Manager CreativeX, AI Gen Creative Building

Amazon Advertising Creative Building Team Leader

Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses. Amazon's advertising portfolio helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The primary goals are to help shoppers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their business objectives, and build a sustainable business that continuously innovates on behalf of customers. Our products and solutions are strategically important to enable our Retail and Marketplace businesses to drive long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day!

The Creative Building team is part of a newly formed, VP-led organization named CreativeX, which sits within Amazon Advertising. Its mission is to democratize access to high-quality creatives using AI Gen Tech.

This is a highly visible position with significant impact and growth. To be successful in this role, you are customer obsessed and have sharp business acumen to build a product vision, charter and roadmap that contributes to the success of our customers. You are a technical leader with good record of building and growing engineering teams, and shipping highly scaled software infrastructure. You work with wide range of technologies, programming languages and systems. You ship high quality software, own the day to day maintenance and evolution of systems that serve the needs of our large and growing base of users. We are looking for a leader who can thrive in a startup environment, thinks big, embraces complexity and ambiguity, can move fast, and be responsible for all aspects of software development.

Key Job Responsibilities

• Keep your team fully staffed. Focus on hiring inclusive and diverse talent. Track staffing and hiring metrics and work closely with recruiting teams to maintain a full engineering team.
• Develop your team members. Ensure everyone on your team has clearly documented personal, team, and business goals. Track progress to those goals. Provide opportunities for career growth both within and outside of your team.
• Build operational excellence. Prioritize operational excellence (OE). Reduce the amount of time your team members spend on operational issues. Create OE dashboards for increased visibility. Ensure OE practices are documented and followed.
• Communicate your business priorities. Understand your customer and partner priorities. Create and own team tenets, and use them to guide your decisions and approaches. Own your engineering roadmap. Manage stakeholder expectations. Create a three year plan for engineering (3YP) and communicate it broadly.
• Deliver your roadmap to schedule. Work backwards from your customer and create key results backed up by data. Build mechanisms that monitor progress against goals. Simply and innovate - create hackathons/ideathons to encourage bottom-up innovation. Communicate a delivery plan and deliver to that plan.

A day in the life you will be leading a team of SDEs and FEEs on building new conversation AI product to help advertisers. You will work closely with other teams within CRX on design and implementation of solutions. You will supervise the creation of design documents and the presentation of those to teams, and will be expected to provide feedback on design artifacts submitted by both your Engineers and other teams. You will lead daily standups with the engineering team. You will work with product managers to understand product needs and also help them drive right product experience.

About the team we enable advertisers to use the power and magic of generative AI in their ads to achieve their brand goals on Amazon. We leverage generative AI, including large language models (LLMs), and generative image and video models, to create step function improvements in the creation and adoption of performant ads on Amazon. Advertisers can use AI to generate new creative ideas, add diversity to their existing ideas, expand their reach to new platforms that were previously arduous and optimize their ad messaging for specific audiences. When we succeed in our mission, more advertisers are able to tell a more compelling advertising story, at a reduced cost, to more shoppers. We have been focused on self-service advertisers (SB, SD, ST) that do not have access to creative assets and where there's a big opportunity to help advertisers expand into rich media advertising. As our capabilities have improved, we have started expanding beyond this cohort, where there is a need to help more sophisticated advertisers and ad agencies.