Sr. Manager, Prototyping AI and Customer Engineering, AWS Prototyping and AI Customer Engineering (PACE)

AWS Prototyping and AI Customer Engineering (PACE) is the team customers work with when they need to move from idea to production on their most complex AI and cloud challenges. We build working prototypes, run executive briefings, and deliver guided builds that compress months of development into days. Our work directly influences customer commitment decisions spanning generative AI, agentic architectures, computer vision, and full-stack cloud modernization. PACE operates globally with teams aligned to industry verticals in each geo, ensuring deep customer proximity and field stakeholder partnership.

We are looking for a Sr. Manager, Solutions Architecture to lead one of the PACE North America delivery teams, aligned to Financial Services (FSI), Retail & (CPG), and Canada (inclusive of all industries). You will own integrated PODs, each paired with a technical program manager and dedicated prototyping architects, and you will be responsible for the quality, velocity, and business impact of every engagement your team delivers. You will manage approximately 10 to 12 people directly.

You will develop deep relationships with field stakeholders (Sales Directors, Solutions Architecture Leaders, CSM Leaders) across FSI, Retail and CPG, and Canada. You will own the delivery side of those partnerships and drive operational rigor: capacity planning, engagement intake prioritization, prototype quality standards, and the mechanisms that connect prototyping work to launched revenue. You will coach and grow your team across a mix of experience levels, from early-career prototyping architects through senior technical program managers.

The right person for this role has experience building and shipping production-grade AI systems, has led technical teams through ambiguous customer problems, and has the judgment to know when a prototype needs another day of polish and when it needs to ship now. You care about growing people as much as growing the business, and you can context-switch between coaching a newer team member and presenting to a customer CTO in the same afternoon.

Key job responsibilities Lead, coach, and develop a team of prototyping architects and technical program managers organized in industry-aligned PODs covering FSI, Retail and CPG, and Canada. Own hiring, onboarding, performance management, and promotion readiness for every team member.

Own engagement delivery quality and velocity for your PODs. Set the technical bar for prototypes, executive briefing centers (EBCs), guided builds, and AI Discovery Lifecycle (AI-DLC) workshops. Review architectures and unblock technical decisions across your team's engagements.

Build and maintain deep stakeholder relationships with Sales, SA, and CSM leadership across your industry verticals. Participate in pipeline reviews, strategy sessions, and QBRs. Be the delivery-side counterpart that field leaders call when they need prototyping capacity for a critical account.

Drive operational mechanisms: engagement intake and prioritization, capacity planning and allocation, prototype-to-production tracking, and the reporting that connects delivery to business outcomes. Ensure your PODs are staffed to meet demand without burning out individuals.

Maintain technical currency with GenAI and cloud architecture to sustain credibility with your team and with field stakeholders, particularly in agentic AI (AgentCore, Bedrock Agents), foundation model deployment (SageMaker, EKS), and multi-agent systems.

Partner with peer managers and the PACE North America Leader to balance capacity across verticals during demand spikes, share prototyping assets and patterns across PODs, and maintain a unified quality bar for the organization.

Identify patterns across customer engagements in your verticals and codify them into reusable assets (reference architectures, starter kits, workshop frameworks) that accelerate future delivery and feed the PACE Scale motion.

About the team ACE operates at the frontier of what customers are building on AWS. We are the team that takes the hardest "can we actually do this?" questions from the field and turns them into working systems, often in days. Our prototypes have influenced customer commitments across every major industry, displaced competitors in active evaluations, and produced reusable assets now adopted across AWS. We work across every major AI paradigm (generative AI, computer vision, NLP, physical AI, agentic systems) and every major industry vertical in North America.

We are a small, high-output team. That means every person matters, every engagement matters, and the manager closest to the work has real influence on business outcomes. If you want a leadership role where your decisions directly move the needle, this is it.

- Bachelor's degree - 7+ years of management of technical, enterprise customer facing resources or equivalent experience - Knowledge of software development tools and methodologies - Demonstrated ability to build relationships with senior technical and business stakeholders (VP/C-level) and translate their business problems into technical solutions. - Experience working directly with enterprise customers on complex technical engagements, including architecture design, proof-of-concept development, and production deployment.

- Experience with generative AI technologies, including foundation models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic architectures, and multi-agent systems. - Familiarity with AWS AI/ML services (Bedrock, AgentCore, SageMaker, Q) and cloud-native architectures. - Track record of building and scaling prototyping or rapid delivery teams that operate at the intersection of sales engineering and product development. - Experience managing geographically distributed teams across multiple time zones, including cross-border teams.

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, IL, Chicago - 201,000.00 - 272,000.00 USD annually USA, NY, New York - 221,100.00 - 299,200.00 USD annually USA, VA, Arlington - 201,000.00 - 272,000.00 USD annually