Principal Design Lead, AWS Brand & Creative

Principal Design Lead

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