Principal Design Lead, AWS Brand & Creative

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