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Principal Design Lead, AWS Brand & Creative
Seattle, Washington, USA
full-timeMarketing & PRJob Description
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.
Key job responsibilities
Design System Leadership & Brand Coherence
- 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
Influence & Bar-Raising
- 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
Cross-Organizational Influence & Collaboration - -
- 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
Production-Aware Design
- 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
Data-Informed Creative Excellence
- 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
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.
Key job responsibilities
Design System Leadership & Brand Coherence
- 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
Influence & Bar-Raising
- 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
Cross-Organizational Influence & Collaboration - -
- 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
Production-Aware Design
- 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
Data-Informed Creative Excellence
- 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