Hiring is one of the most consequential decisions a person makes or receives, and the tools that power it are becoming genuinely agentic. We are seeking a Senior Manager of UX to lead the design and research organization behind our hiring portfolio at exactly this inflection point.

This is a rare leadership role. The products your team shapes increasingly act on behalf of the people who use them: drafting job descriptions, surfacing candidates, generating assessments, flagging risks, and moving work forward. The underlying systems are probabilistic. The experiences your team designs must not be. Your core challenge is building and leading a team that can translate AI systems operating on confidence, inference, and ranked signals into interactions that feel trustworthy, purposeful, and in control - where users understand what the system did, why, and what happens next.

You are a people leader with dual accountability: you own experience strategy across the full hiring portfolio, and you build the team, culture, and craft bar that make world-class work repeatable - not dependent on any one person. You partner as a peer with Principal Engineers, senior PMs, and Research and Product leaders from strategy through launch. You influence product direction and long-term business strategy, and you set the quality bar by developing the people and mechanisms that hold it.

Key job responsibilities

**Lead and grow the UX organization.** Build, structure, and develop a high-performing team of designers and researchers. Own hiring, org design, headcount planning, and resourcing across the portfolio. Set clear performance expectations, give direct and developmental feedback, manage performance, and actively drive career growth - including contributions to the promotion process. Recruit and raise the bar on talent.

**Own experience vision and strategy across the hiring portfolio.** Set the north star for Recruiter Hub, Hiring Hub, and Candidate Hub as a coherent, connected system - not three products. Define how users move between surfaces, how context transfers, and how the portfolio adds up to more than its parts. Lead this vision through your team rather than solely through your own hands.

**Define the agentic interaction model for hiring - through your team.** Own the strategy for experiences where AI acts on behalf of recruiters and hiring managers: delegation surfaces, approval flows, correction mechanisms, confidence transparency, and escalation paths. Establish the principles for when the system should act, when it should ask, and what trust looks like when it gets something wrong - and hold the team accountable to them.

**Establish scalable mechanisms and cross-product standards.** Create the interaction models, experience principles, design patterns, and measurement systems that govern AI-assisted hiring surfaces across the portfolio (e.g., UX/CX benchmarking, customer-frustration tracking, ongoing experience measurement). Ensure the system speaks one language at the human-AI boundary and that quality scales across partner teams rather than depending on heroics.

**Set and hold the design excellence bar.** Act as creative director for quality across the portfolio. Partner with and develop design and research leaders to raise the floor on visual craft, interaction quality, research rigor, and storytelling. Establish the review mechanisms and standards that make the bar visible and durable.

**Influence product and business direction.** Work with senior leadership to identify where design and research unlock product strategy, not just execute it. Bring recruiter, hiring manager, and candidate insight into roadmap decisions before requirements are written. Contribute to OP1/OP2 and 3-Year Plan (3YP) efforts, and be a named voice in strategic tradeoffs across major products and product suites.

**Own strategic communications.** Own research narratives, experience strategy documents, executive readouts, and quarterly status updates within and outside the organization. Make design and research rationale legible to non-designers and make the business case for quality to executive leadership.

**Drive rigor and delivery through the team.** Ensure the team uses research, behavioral data, and usability findings to diagnose the real problem before proposing solutions, and that specifications function as behavior contracts partners can build against. Ensure engineering partnership through delivery and close the gap between intent and reality.

A day in the life

You start your morning in a portfolio review - but you're not critiquing pixels, you're developing judgment. A designer walks through the AI-generated candidate summary feature; you name the three places where the model's uncertainty isn't surfaced and coach the team on why that matters for trust, so they catch it themselves next time. By mid-morning you're in a product strategy session with the PM and Principal Engineer on the Candidate Hub, where a roadmap capability threatens to fragment the experience into a fourth surface - you reframe the conversation and align leadership on the connected-system alternative.

In the afternoon you're working org problems: a hiring loop for a senior researcher, a career-development conversation with a design lead who's ready to grow, and a resourcing tradeoff across two teams competing for the same headcount. You end the day reviewing your team's craft bar - not to approve work, but to make sure the standard is visible, shared, and getting higher without you in the room.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

- 10+ years of leading multi-discipline Design teams (ie. visual design, interaction design, user research, etc.) experience

- 5+ years of people management experience, including hiring, developing, and managing designers and/or researchers

- Experience owning experience strategy and setting the quality bar across multiple products or a product suite

- Experience partnering with senior Product, Engineering, and Research leaders to influence product and business strategy

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Experience in system design

- Track record of developing leaders and contributing to promotion and career-growth processes

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, WA, Bellevue - 180,300.00 - 244,000.00 USD annually

USA, WA, Seattle - 180,300.00 - 244,000.00 USD annually