Description
Outbound is re-imagining the communications and marketing landscape with generative and agentic AI, changing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond.
Amazon reaches shoppers billions of times through email, mobile push, SMS, and other messaging channels. We're turning that into a marketplace. Each shopper's limited attention is the supply. The messages that compete for it, and the marketers, category leaders, and AI agents who create them, are the demand. A separate team runs the auction that decides which message earns each moment. This role builds the demand side: everything that determines how good, how varied, and how dependable the content and campaigns entering that marketplace are.
Today, most marketing email still looks like a catalog printout, and the tools behind it make ambitious creative slow and fragile. We want Amazon's messages to have the visual quality of the best brand content on social, and to be relevant to the specific moment a customer is in. A customer getting into cycling, or planning a first camping trip, should get a story-led series built for that interest, not a generic deal alert. Picture a feed: AI agents continuously generate on-brand, category-specific content from customer and category signals, and the marketplace decides what each customer sees and when. Your team makes that inventory rich, high quality, and trustworthy.
As the Senior Manager, Software Development for Generative Marketing & Demand, you'll build and lead an organization of software engineers, working closely with applied scientists and design technologists. You'll own:
- The authoring platform (open source). A toolkit that takes a design from Figma, a brief in Slack, or a contributor's draft and produces finished, accessible, on-brand content for email, push, and long-form article pages. It covers a shared component and design-token spec, a compiler that produces inbox-safe output that renders as designed in every client, automated checks (accessibility, size, links, deliverability, brand rules), real-client previews, and in-thread review and approval. We intend to build the core in the open under a permissive license, so the industry's best email and design-tool engineers can improve it alongside us, while Amazon's customer data, brand, and sending systems plug in privately through adapters.
- Generative and agentic content. Agents that draft, adapt, and localize creative, generate lifestyle imagery for catalog products, write copy in a brand's voice, and assemble category-specific stories and drip series from customer and category signals and from opportunities the marketplace sends back. Every generated piece passes the same gates as human work before it reaches a customer.
- Campaign planning and execution. The tools marketing teams use to plan, configure, schedule, and operate campaigns and coordinated waves of campaigns, including peak events like Prime Day. The bar is simple: what a marketer plans is what customers get. Operators see the effective send window, the policies that apply (quiet hours, cadence, consent, channel limits), and a reconciled funnel from audience to delivery, with the reason behind every number, before and during a send rather than in a retro afterward.
- Data and audience connectors. A pluggable, documented mechanism for bringing in audiences, catalog and deal data, recommendations, and third-party sources, with timeouts, fallbacks, and validation, so new data sources can be added without platform changes. Connectors built by Amazon teams and by the open-source community use the same contract.
- Send-path reliability. Low-latency, high-throughput content rendering and handoff to Amazon's sending infrastructure at peak-event volumes, with verifiable delivery: every send is traceable, auditable, and reconciles with what was planned.
Key job responsibilities
- Build, hire, and grow a high-performing team of software engineers, including senior and principal engineers and, as the organization scales, managers. Set a high hiring bar and develop the next generation of technical leaders.
- Own the Generative Marketing & Demand vision, roadmap, and multi-year plan (OP1/OP2) with product, design, science, and marketing partners. Turn an ambiguous goal, best-in-class creative and campaign tooling in an industry with strong commercial incumbents, into a delivery plan with measurable milestones.
- Lead the open-source program for the authoring platform. Work with Amazon's open-source office and Legal on licensing and the open/private boundary. Build the community mechanisms that make it a multi-party project rather than an Amazon-only one: public roadmap, RFC process for spec changes, contribution and code-review standards, conformance tests, release management, security response, and named maintainers inside and outside Amazon. Recruit external maintainers and early adopters (other companies, agencies, ESPs, and design-tool developers), and measure the project's health by external contributors and downstream adoption.
- Hold a clear architectural line between open and private: nothing in the open core depends on Amazon systems, no customer data flows through open code paths, and Amazon runs the released open packages rather than a fork.
- Be accountable for outcomes. Creative quality and relevance (engagement, conversion, and incremental lift against holdouts), brief-to-approved-content time, rendering and accessibility defects, plan-versus-actual send accuracy, and marketer adoption are the measures. Opens alone are not.
- Partner with applied scientists on content generation, creative quality scoring, category and interest modeling, and the signals that tell agents which content to create for which customer moment. Move models from research to production quickly and safely.
- Partner with the marketplace team so that content, metadata, and quality signals flow cleanly into the attention auction, and opportunity signals flow back to content agents.
- Make AI-generated content safe by default: brand, legal, claims, accessibility, and deliverability checks block publishing automatically; human reviewers focus on judgment; prompts and outputs are logged; and responsible-AI, privacy, and communications compliance requirements (CAN-SPAM, TCPA, GDPR, consent) are non-negotiable.
- Drive adoption across a broad set of internal tenants, including Retail, Prime, Prime Video, Music, Alexa, and Ads marketing teams, and category leaders who contribute long-form content. Meet them in the tools they already use (Figma, Slack, documents, CLI, and agent clients via MCP) rather than asking them to learn a new console.
- Own operational excellence: on-call health, alarming, COEs, security reviews, service-level goals, and peak-event readiness, including during Prime Day, Prime Big Deal Days, and the holidays.
- Communicate clearly in writing and in reviews with senior leadership, including narratives, PR/FAQs, and business reviews, and represent Amazon externally in the open-source and email-engineering communities.
A day in the life
You might start with the open-source triage: an external contributor's pull request fixes a dark-mode rendering bug in a new mail-client release, and another company has proposed an RFC to extend the spec for interactive modules. Then you'd review the weekly metrics: a category storytelling pilot for outdoor gear is showing incremental new-to-category customers against its holdout, and brief-to-approved time dropped below a day. After that, you'd walk a marketing lead through a readiness review for the next peak event, where the wave view shows every campaign's effective send window and flags one that a channel quiet-hour rule will cut short, so it gets fixed before the event instead of during it. In the afternoon, you'd join a design review for a new connector contract with your principal engineer, meet with an applied scientist on why generated lifestyle imagery is drifting off-brand for one category, and close an offer for a senior engineer who found the team through the open-source project.
About the team
We're a high-ownership team in Outbound Communications, building the tools that decide how good Amazon's messages can be. We build from first principles, work in the open where it makes the product better, and hold to one rule: every message has to be worth the customer's attention.
Basic Qualifications
- 10+ years of engineering experience
- 5+ years of engineering team management experience
- 10+ years of planning, designing, developing and delivering consumer software experience
- Experience partnering with product or program management teams
- Experience managing multiple concurrent programs, projects and development teams in an Agile environment
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience partnering with product and program management teams
- Experience designing and developing large scale, high-traffic applications
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.
The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including 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, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits .
USA, NY, New York - 242,100.00 - 327,500.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Seattle - 220,100.00 - 297,700.00 USD annually
