Description

Advertising is being remade. The brands that win the next decade will be the ones that figure out how to deliver creative that is personal, performant, and produced at a scale no human team can match alone. Generative AI is the unlock. But generation alone is not the advantage. The advantage belongs to the system that connects creation to delivery to learning, and gets better with every impression.
Amazon Ads is building that system. We are investing in the models, the infrastructure, and the product intelligence to make personalized, brand-aligned creative a default capability for every advertiser, not a luxury reserved for the largest budgets. The work is early, the stakes are high, and the opportunity to define how this category develops is real.
We are building that system. And we need a Design Tech Manager to build and lead the team that makes it real.

Key job responsibilities
As Design Tech Manager for POD's Design Technology team, you will build and lead a frontline team of Design Technologists and AI prototypers — the block-shaped generalists who span design, engineering, and data. Your team sits at the intersection of design vision and production reality. You don't just prototype concepts; you ship functional experiments with real model behavior, graduate winners into engineering roadmaps, and set the technical bar for how design and AI interact across the creative stack.
This is a player-coach role. You will manage, develop, and grow a team of 4–8 DTs while remaining a credible technical and design voice in cross-functional conversations with engineering, science, and product leadership. You will own the team's execution, define its standards, and drive the process improvements that let POD ship at the velocity the best AI organizations demand.


A day in the life
Team Leadership & People Development
• Hire, develop, and retain a high-performing team of Design Technologists and AI prototypers; own their growth, performance, and career trajectories
• Set clear expectations, provide direct and actionable feedback, and conduct rigorous performance assessments in partnership with other design technology leaders
• Build a team culture grounded in craft, speed, and learning, where shipping a working prototype beats presenting a polished deck
• Actively recruit and grow design technology talent across the organization; mentor individual contributors at multiple levels
Technical & Design Leadership
• Lead the team in building large-scale, production-quality prototypes for POD's highest-priority AI and creative initiatives
• Establish and enforce technical standards across prototype and reference code, including security, maintainability, scalability, and extensibility
• Drive adoption of shared prototyping tools, frameworks, and platforms across the design org; create infrastructure that multiplies team output
• Serve as a trusted technical voice for engineering partners; earn credibility through demonstrated quality and architectural thinking
Execution & Delivery
• Own the team's delivery against POD's roadmap; break complex, ambiguous problems into parallel workstreams and drive execution with limited guidance
• Operate at the intersection of design and engineering, embedding directly with product and science teams to pair on implementation and polish in production
• Compress the cycle from design concept to live production test; move fast on standardized formats and faster on novel ones
• Identify and resolve root causes of endemic workflow problems; build tools and services that increase team throughput
Cross-Functional Influence
• Influence UX strategy and technical direction across POD and its partner organizations
• Build consensus across discordant views; represent the design technology perspective in planning, roadmap, and architecture conversations
• Partner with creative, product, and science leadership to ensure prototype work is grounded in real advertiser and shopper problems, and that winning experiments have a clear path to scale