Sr Manager, PMT-ES, Design Systems, AWS Applied AI Solutions

DESCRIPTION

As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, we have a vision to provide business applications, leveraging Amazon’s unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers’ businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon’s real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use.

We are looking for a single-threaded leader to own an agent-first design system end-to-end: product vision, roadmap, engineering execution, adoption, and business outcomes. This is a builder-leader role. You will lead a team of PM, SDEs, MLEs, and front-end engineers, and partner closely with the AAIS UX Design organization — design and creative direction, and the design team itself, sit with the UX design leader; you own prioritization, delivery, and the business results.

The design system you will own rethinks how humans interact with AI. Rather than bolting conversational agents onto legacy interfaces, it places the human-AI relationship at the center of the design. It is built on the philosophy, called humorphism, that if people are going to work alongside AI teammates the way they work with human teammates, the interaction layer should be designed around how people have collaborated in work settings for decades, not around how they’ve clicked through software.

The work spans both proven agentic patterns and experimental approaches. Some components and patterns are ready for product teams to consume today. Others are on an innovation track where new AI-native interaction paradigms get invented before they are ready to be productized.

Adoption is a first-class workstream: making the design system easy for teams to adopt, resolving their blockers, and building the engineering relationships across AAIS and beyond.

You will set the roadmap, manage cross-functional stakeholders across AAIS and partner teams, and personally contribute to the technical direction of the system. You must be design-obsessed — someone with genuine taste who believes delight is a differentiator for any product experience — and comfortable operating at the intersection of design craft, front-end engineering, and product strategy.

You will be an engaged creative partner to the design organization: bringing a strong point of view, disagreeing and committing, and diving into the design conversation as readily as the engineering one, while leaving the design work itself to the designers. In its current phase of development, the role will require strong communication, product-leadership partnership, and research-grounded decisions.

Key job responsibilities

• Own the product vision and roadmap. Define what the design system builds next based on portfolio needs, customer feedback, and design research. Balance near-term adoption with long-term architectural bets (e.g., confidence/uncertainty primitives, earned context, reasoning transparency).
• Design the best, for the most, for the least. Do the best work for the most customers for the least specialized effort — every unit of work should reach a large number of people, not one targeted product. Resist one-off asks from individual apps; reframe them into patterns that generalize. Stop at doing the work for a team — do it with them and for everyone. Build coherence across the experience layer and a felt sense of product family, not siloed one-off features. This is the systems-thinking bar for the whole team.
• Balance velocity with room to explore. Be a force for the team’s momentum, and plan deliberately for exploration where it counts — research, inspiration, and critique — so the hardest problems get the depth they deserve instead of being rushed. Know when a problem earns many explorations and when one will do.
• Lead the “Own It. Ship It. Together.” collaboration model. The team operates through a paired model — named engineer + designer from day one, building simultaneously rather than sequentially. Sustain and scale this model as more teams adopt the design system.
• Drive platform adoption without mandates. The guiding principle is that adoption is earned through usefulness, not ma…