**The Opportunity**
95% of enterprise technology pilots deliver zero measurable P&L impact. The technology works - the gap is in the last mile: getting production systems running inside complex enterprises where legacy infrastructure, regulated data, and organizational complexity collide. AWS is making a billion-dollar investment in Forward Deployed Engineering ("FDE") to close that gap, and we're hiring product leaders who will define what we build and why.
This is a greenfield role. You'll build a product management practice, shape an entirely new category at AWS, and establish the engagement model that delivers delightful outcomes enabling customers to transform themselves.
**The Role**
As the Director of Product Management - Forward Deployed Engineering will lead product management for FDE, building and leading the PM team that owns the end-to-end product lifecycle from customer engagement through production delivery through optimization and self-sufficiency. Your product managers embed directly inside enterprise customers - defining outcomes, writing specs, working hand-in-hand with engineering to ship production systems - and every engagement feeds back into AWS services and an underlying platform that makes the next one faster.
This is not a traditional AWS Product Management role. FDE product managers are field-facing: they live inside delivery, sit with customers, and turn engagement learnings into compounding platform value. You are the "CEO of the customer problem" - responsible for the *why* and *what*, while engineering owns the *how*.
Key job responsibilities
### Product Leadership
You own the customer outcomes. Your teams operate inside customer environments under real constraints and ambitious timelines - regulated data, brownfield infrastructure, multi-stakeholder governance. You lead the customer engagement strategy from the product side: define what a great pod PM does, allocate PM talent across engagements, ensure pods are solving the right problems, and hold executive customer relationships at the CIO/CTO level built on trust earned through delivered outcomes.
### Product & Platform Influence
You see what breaks across deployments and turn that into product direction. You influence AWS service roadmap from a position of earned authority because you've lived the deployment pain firsthand, and identify when custom pod work should graduate into platform primitives or native service capabilities.
You shape the FDE engagement model: how we scope, what we deliver, what we price, what we leave behind.
### Industry Practice & Productization
You build the domain expertise that compounds. Your teams develop industry-specific accelerators, reference architectures, and blueprints that generate pipeline for the next customer in your vertical. You define the use cases that feed qualification, pricing, and pod composition. You measure what matters: asset reuse rate, time-to-value, engagement velocity
### Go-to-Market Partnership
You partner with sales, specialists, and marketing to define pricing, packaging, and positioning. You own the commercial model for FDE engagements - how we price outcomes, what the customer buys, and how we demonstrate ROI. You build pipeline through customer stories, reference architectures
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field
- 15+ years in product management, with significant experience in enterprise environments
- Track record building and leading product management teams through complex enterprise applications with direct customer and business impact
- Technical depth - agentic systems, AI/ML, business workflow automation, enterprise integration - ability to engage at the architecture level and roll up sleeves when the hardest problems demand it
- Experience with pricing, packaging, and go-to-market - having partnered with sales, marketing, and GTM teams to define commercial models and build pipeline
- Executive presence with C-suite customers, earned through outcomes - can run a room with a VP/CTO and translate business problems into product requirements in real time
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Founder mentality - has built a team, product, or practice from scratch and scaled it
- Experience delivering production systems inside large enterprise customer environments: regulated data, legacy infrastructure, organizational complexity, multi-party governance
- Has built industry-specific solutions or vertical practices at scale - creating reusable assets that became a competitive moat
- Builder-leader who ships alongside the team, is energized by customer problems, and operates where the customer sees your results in real-time
- Has owned a feedback loop between field/deployment teams and a product/platform org - knows how to turn deployment pain into roadmap priorities with data and earned credibility
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, East Palo Alto - 273,100.00 - 350,000.00 USD annually
USA, MA, Boston - 237,500.00 - 321,300.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Seattle - 237,500.00 - 321,300.00 USD annually
