Advertising is being remade. The brands that win the next decade will be the ones that figure out how to deliver creative that is personal, performant, and produced at a scale no human team can match alone. Generative AI is the unlock. But generation alone is not the advantage. The advantage belongs to the system that connects creation to delivery to learning, and gets better with every impression.
Amazon Ads is building that system. We are investing in the models, the infrastructure, and the product intelligence to make personalized, brand-aligned creative a default capability for every advertiser, not a luxury reserved for the largest budgets. The work is early, the stakes are high, and the opportunity to define how this category develops is real. We are building that system. We need a Principal AI Creative Director to define what great looks like inside it and to make that definition teachable, scalable, and machine-readable.
Key job responsibilities As Principal AI Creative Director for Personalization Optimization and Design (POD), you are the human judgment layer at the center of Amazon's AI creative system. Generative AI has commoditized asset creation. The durable differentiator is now creative direction: the taste, the standards, the brand intelligence, and the systematic thinking that ensures our system produces creative that builds brands, not just optimizes clicks.
This is not a role about using AI tools, though you must be among the most fluent practitioners working today. It is about understanding what makes a great commercial, a great piece of content, a great brand moment, and then decomposing that understanding into primitives: the story arc, the color logic, the compositional tension, the emotional beat, the brand signal. Those primitives are what our systems learn from, replicate, and eventually govern at scale.
You will operate as a principal-level individual contributor with org-wide influence, partnering directly with design, engineering, science, and product leadership across every surface (POD) owns.
A day in the life Creative Direction and Quality Standards: Define and own the creative quality bar for AI-generated assets across POD's full portfolio, including images, video, copy, and multi-format compositions. Establish brand intelligence frameworks that ensure AI outputs are aesthetically coherent, emotionally resonant, and brand-safe at scale. Act as the senior creative editor for AI-generated content, distinguishing exceptional work from "good enough" outputs and articulating the difference in decomposable, teachable terms. Decomposing Creative into Primitives.
Lead the Systemization of Taste: Break down what makes great creative into its constituent elements: narrative structure, color theory, compositional hierarchy, emotional arc, pacing, and brand signal. Translate these primitives into structured frameworks, including prompt libraries, creative briefs, quality rubrics, and annotation schemas, that inform model training, DCO reward signals, and creative tooling. Define the primitives that power aesthetic moderation: the signals and thresholds that allow our systems to evaluate, filter, and rank AI-generated content without requiring human review of every asset. Partner with applied science and engineering to operationalize these as machine-readable inputs.
Hands-On Production and Prototyping: Produce high-quality creative content independently across modalities, including image, video, and copy, using the leading AI creation tools. Bring that same hands-on fluency to prototyping: build working creative prototypes that demonstrate new customer experiences, surface trade-offs, and create decision points for design, product, and engineering leadership. This role operates in a demo-driven culture where prototypes move decisions. You are expected to contribute directly to that culture, not just direct others within it. Maintain current, deep fluency across tools including text-to-image (Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Stable Diffusion), text-to-video (Sora, Runway, Kling), and LLM-powered copy and agentic workflows.
Defining New Creative Experiences: Partner with design, product, and engineering to define what new AI-powered creative experiences should look and feel like for advertisers.
Translate Creative Vision into CX direction: How should a brand interact with a generative creative system? What does a great AI-assisted creative workflow feel like? Advise on the experience design for advertiser-facing tools, including Creative Studio, Video Generator, and the creative agent, ensuring AI capabilities are surfaced in ways that are legible, trustworthy, and creatively empowering.
Aesthetic Moderation and Governance: Build and own the aesthetic moderation framework for POD: the multi-dimensional quality scorecard that defines what "premium creative" means in measurable, auditable terms across visual quality, brand alignment, emotional resonance, and format appropriateness. Establish governance processes, including quality thresholds, brand safety standards, and editorial review workflows, that scale without requiring human review of every asset. Partner with advertiser-facing teams to translate brand requirements into creative direction that AI systems can operationalize and enforce.
Cross-Functional Creative Leadership: Serve as the creative authority in cross-functional conversations with engineering, science, product, and design leadership, earning influence through demonstrated quality and creative vision. Partner with the Design Technology team to ensure prototypes reflect a high creative bar before graduating into engineering roadmaps. Collaborate with PAO (Creative Personalization and Optimization) to ensure personalized creative variants maintain quality and brand coherence at impression level.
Basic Qualifications
● 10+ years of creative direction experience, with a portfolio demonstrating exceptional craft across visual design, brand identity, advertising, or digital creative ● 2+ years of demonstrated, hands-on work in AI content creation, including major campaigns, brand work, or personal projects that showcase advanced fluency with generative AI tools across image, video, and copy ● Ability to produce finished creative content independently across modalities using AI tools, not just direct others to do so ● Deep understanding of what makes great creative, including narrative structure, color theory, compositional hierarchy, emotional arc, pacing, and brand signal, and the ability to articulate these elements in precise, teachable, decomposable terms ● Experience working at the intersection of creative and technology, collaborating with engineering, product, or data science teams to build creative systems ● Demonstrated ability to influence without authority in large, cross-functional organizations
Preferred Qualifications
● Experience in advertising, e-commerce, or performance marketing contexts, with an understanding of how creative connects to business metrics, conversion, and brand equity ● Experience building creative quality frameworks, brand standards, or design systems that scale across large organizations or product portfolios ● Track record of translating creative intuition into structured, systematic frameworks, including prompt libraries, quality rubrics, annotation schemas, or training data curation ● Familiarity with aesthetic moderation, content quality scoring, or automated creative evaluation ● Familiarity with Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), personalization systems, or data-driven creative ● Experience contributing to or advising on AI model development from a creative direction perspective, including feedback on outputs, training data curation, or quality reward signal definition ● Proficiency with design tools (Figma, Adobe Creative Suite) to refine, annotate, and communicate creative direction alongside AI-generated outputs
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, NY, New York - 201,800.00 - 273,000.00 USD annually