Design Transformation Lead, Amazon Design Excellence

About the team

Join Amazon Design Excellence (ADX), the central design organization partnering with design teams across Amazon's lines of business. Design teams are embedded in their businesses while ADX provides frameworks, capabilities, and infrastructure that elevate practice company-wide. Within ADX, you'll work in the Design Quality & Excellence (DQ&E) pillar, defining what great design looks like at Amazon scale. We shape how design teams adopt AI, govern design systems, develop capabilities, and optimize their tooling infrastructure. Our work requires balancing enterprise coherence with organizational autonomy—building solutions that work for teams of 5 designers and teams of 500.

Key job responsibilities

• Design and lead transformation initiatives that elevate design practice across multiple business areas, including AI adoption, design maturity evolution, and new methodology implementation
• Evaluate, integrate, and optimize design tooling and technology infrastructure, ensuring tools connect effectively and enable efficient workflows
• Earn trust with design and research practitioners, design leaders, and cross-functional partners by demonstrating deep craft knowledge and understanding their day-to-day challenges
• Partner across business areas to understand challenges, align on transformation priorities, and drive adoption
• Create frameworks, playbooks, and operating mechanisms that scale design excellence while respecting organizational context and autonomy
• Measure transformation impact through adoption metrics, capability growth indicators, and design maturity assessments
• Navigate organizational dynamics and resistance to change, building coalitions and aligning incentives to drive sustainable transformation
• Establish governance frameworks for new practices that balance consistency with flexibility
• Communicate transformation vision and progress to stakeholders at all levels, from practitioners to executives
• Partner with cross-functional teams (engineering, product, data science) to ensure transformation initiatives enable effective collaboration and shared success

Basic Qualifications

• 7+ years of design experience
• 5+ years of experience in design practice (UX/product design, research, design ops or related disciplines) with demonstrated craft expertise
• 2+ years in design operations or a role with significant design operations responsibilities
• 3+ years of experience leading organizational change, transformation initiatives, or capability building programs
• Experience driving adoption of new practices, tools, or methodologies across multiple teams or organizations
• Experience with design tools, technology infrastructure, and workflow optimization

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of project management tools and methodologies (agile to waterfall)
• Experience working and contributing to project playbooks, building schedules, managing issues/risks, establishing communication plans and stakeholder management