The posting
Alexa is Amazon's AI assistant, and customers have been talking to it for years. They already have a relationship with Alexa and an opinion about who Alexa is. The way Alexa talks, reacts, and connects is central to what makes it distinctive, and we are looking for a Principal Product Manager – Technical to own the vision for that: who Alexa is, how it engages, and how it makes millions of customers feel understood in every interaction. You will decide what that character becomes next. The work you own shapes every customer conversation, on every device, in every context.
Role summary
Alexa is a distinct character, and that character is a core part of what makes Alexa valuable to customers. As the Principal PMT for Alexa Personality & EQ, you will define and protect it. You will own the multi-year vision for who Alexa is and how it expresses that identity across every customer interaction: its voice, tone, emotional intelligence, and humor. You will hold two goals in tension, making Alexa feel deeply personalized to each customer while remaining unmistakably and consistently itself.
This is a hands-in-the-product role, not a set-strategy-and-hand-off role. You'll author instructions and style prompts that produce Alexa's personality, ship those changes, and iterate week over week. The work demands real technical depth: you will work directly with frontier models, partner with design on how the character is expressed in the experience, and partner closely with science and engineering on how the models are tuned and evaluated, operating at the edge of what they can do today.
You will translate a subjective, high-judgment question, "who should Alexa be, and how should it feel to interact with Alexa," into a concrete and decomposed strategy that can be applied across Alexa, an explicit and measurable definition of Alexa's emotional intelligence, and shipped experiences. Building the mechanisms to measure that standard is as much of the job as defining it, through to the go/no-go calls on shipping model and prompt changes. These approaches are established and still evolving quickly, which means part of the work is inventing what comes next. Someone expecting pure creative strategy will be surprised by how much rigor this demands.
While you own the character strategy, there are many pieces across the technology stack that you will influence (not own), like the deeper technology that produces Alexa's voice and visual rendering. You co-own the quality bar with design, who shapes how the character is expressed in interaction, and you are accountable for whether the shipped expression is true to Alexa's personality. You are also the steward of keeping Alexa, Alexa, catching updates, new features, and convergence pressure that would dilute the character.
Personality is one of the most subjective domains in product development. There is no ground truth and no dataset that tells you who Alexa should be. You will need to push innovative ideas through an organization, and have the backbone to defend a creative point of view when the data is ambiguous and the stakes are high. The right person finds that energizing, not exhausting. Because personality touches every response Alexa gives, this is a horizontal charter: you set the bar and drive many product, science, design, and engineering teams to meet it without direct authority.
Key job responsibilities • Define who Alexa is. Own and evangelize the multi-year vision and strategy for Alexa's personality and emotional intelligence, expressed operationally: voice, tone, conversational style, and emotional range. Align leaders behind a single definition that holds across an extremely diverse and vast customer surface area. • Author and ship the instructions that shape how Alexa behaves. Write the character instructions and style prompts that produce Alexa's personality, ship them, and iterate weekly. Partner with design on how the character comes through in the experience, and with science and engineering on how the models are tuned and evaluated. • Define and measure the quality bar, and own the ship decisions. Turn subjective qualities like emotional intelligence into evaluable standards, and build the automated judges and annotation rubrics that measure them. Co-own the bar with design, who shapes how the character is expressed in interaction. Own the calls to ship or hold new model versions and prompt changes, and turn failure patterns in the data into instruction changes the same week. • Own humor and wit as first-class craft. Calibrate joke quality, handle roasts and playful pushback, judge when wit lands, and know when not to be funny. Humor is one of the hardest attributes to get right and one of the most defining. • Protect the character from dilution. Be the backstop that keeps Alexa recognizably Alexa, catching the updates, new features, and convergence pressure that would flatten what makes Alexa distinct. This means holding the bar against cross-team priorities. • Own personalization and the customer-facing controls. Own the product strategy and roadmap for the controls that let people shape how Alexa engages with them, and define how the preferences a customer sets, along with the context of the conversation, shape Alexa's responses. Work with design to define the experience each should produce. • Keep the character trustworthy. Partner with Responsible AI and Trust & Safety so Alexa's personality is appropriate in sensitive contexts and reinforces customer trust. • Look ahead to new forms of expression. Work with design to anticipate the new ways Alexa's character will come through as the experience evolves, and hold the same quality bar wherever it shows up. • Lead horizontally. As the single owner of the bar, drive product, science, design, and engineering teams to meet it without direct authority, and represent Alexa's character in executive-level planning.
- 8+ years of product or program management, product marketing, business development or technology experience - Bachelor's degree - Experience with feature delivery and tradeoffs of a product - Experience owning/driving roadmap strategy and definition - Experience with end to end product delivery - Experience contributing to engineering discussions around technology decisions and strategy related to a product - Experience technical product management
- Experience working directly with Engineers on product enhancements - Experience in project management methodologies, business analysis, or process improvement - Experience with Machine Learning and Large Language Model fundamentals, including architecture, training/inference lifecycles, and optimization of model execution, or experience leading and influencing your team or organization - Experience developing, deploying and managing AI products at scale - MBA, or Master's degree - Experience in verbal and written communication for executive level leaders - Experience building evaluation systems for model quality (for example automated judges, human annotation rubrics, or A/B quality comparisons) and making ship or hold decisions through model migrations. - Experience defining a product vision for something subjective, high-judgment, or brand-defining, and turning it into measurable standards teams can build to. - An instinct for humor and comedic voice as a core tool for expressing character, with experience partnering with writers or designers to move humor from concept to something customers actually feel in the product. - Experience defining and measuring a qualitative attribute (for example tone, sentiment, emotional response, or satisfaction) with rigorous evaluation methods. - A strong bias for experimentation: comfortable forming hypotheses, running rapid tests, learning from ambiguous results, and iterating toward a subjective target. - Experience using research insights (including longitudinal studies of personality perception, style evaluation, and emotional intelligence) as a primary input to strategy. - Experience owning a horizontal or cross-cutting charter spanning many teams without direct authority. - A background that combines the craft of character, voice, writing, or the humanities (for example philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, or narrative and character design) with the analytical rigor to ship and measure at scale.
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
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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, CA, Irvine - 179,900.00 - 243,400.00 USD annually USA, CA, Santa Monica - 179,900.00 - 243,400.00 USD annually USA, WA, Bellevue - 179,900.00 - 243,400.00 USD annually USA, WA, Seattle - 179,900.00 - 243,400.00 USD annually
