Director, AWS Catalog
About the role
The AWS data catalog is how customers find, understand, and govern their data on AWS. The AWS Glue Data Catalog is the metadata layer beneath AWS analytics. It holds the schemas, table definitions, and partitions that Athena, EMR, Redshift, Glue, and SageMaker need to plan and execute a query, which puts it in the data path of nearly every analytical workload our customers run, and its crawlers are how a large share of that metadata gets discovered and kept current in the first place. Alongside it, AWS Lake Formation governs fine-grained access to that data, and Amazon DataZone provides the business context, discovery, and lineage (domains, projects, and data products) that make a data estate comprehensible to the people and applications using it. Together these three services serve customers of every size, from day-one startups to the largest enterprises in the world, and hold the definitive record of the data those customers store in Amazon S3 and query with our engines. We are investing heavily to make working with that data dramatically simpler for customers, and to ensure the catalog operates at the hyperscale we expect AI agents, rather than people, to drive as they become the primary consumers of enterprise data. Catalogs have become the control point for enterprise data and AI, and we are at the very beginning of building the one customers standardize on.
Responsibilities
- Lead a group of top talent building the metadata, governance, and discovery layer for all data on AWS
- Own the AWS Glue Data Catalog and its crawlers, AWS Lake Formation, and Amazon DataZone
- Drive the roadmap and deliver on three fronts at once: building a foundation that operates at a scale and request rate well beyond what any catalog handles today, with the availability and latency that every analytics service above you depends on; making governance simpler and stronger for customers who have to know and prove who can see what across a large data estate; and making the catalog the layer that AI agents reason through, with the discovery, semantic search, and business metadata that let an agent find the right data without being told where it lives
- Hold a deep commitment to open standards, building on Apache Iceberg and the Iceberg REST Catalog and interoperating with third-party catalogs rather than locking customers in
- Lead multiple engineering teams through managers across geographic locations
- Spearhead new technologies that change what a catalog is capable of
- Own the financial health and growth of your services
- Personally engage with C-suite customers to represent AWS's data catalog strategy
- Establish and build relationships with a wide range of peers, including senior AWS executives, customers at all levels of experience and responsibility, deeply technical software and systems engineers within the team, and internal organizations
- Build strong partnerships across engineering teams and bring them along behind a shared technical direction
- Switch between weighing in on complex engineering details, taking a long-term view of the business, growing and developing the next generation of AWS leadership, and operating as a large-scale organization leader
- Balance urgent, high-value customer features against multi-year foundational investment
- Evolve a large and sophisticated installed base without disruption, for customers whose compliance posture depends on us
- Prioritize work for the direct team and partner teams, establish goals, and focus attention on the most important inputs to drive the desired business outcomes
- Scale yourself and your team to meet the ever-increasing demands of a fast-growing business
- Excel at hiring and developing technical talent
- Maintain a passion and discipline around operational excellence, as the catalog is in the path of every query our customers run
Basic Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)
- 15+ years of software development experience
- 10+ years in senior engineering leadership roles
Preferred Qualifications
- Background in data analytics, engines and catalogs
- Proven experience scaling large engineering organizations across multiple geographies
- Track record of delivering customer-facing products with high velocity in a fast-moving, competitive landscape
- Experience leading product engineering, from ideation through design, build, deploy, and support
- Strong written and verbal communication skills; demonstrated thought leadership
- Demonstrated ability to operate as a customer-facing technical executive
Pay
Base salary range: $264,100.00 - $350,000.00 USD annually in Seattle, WA. 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.
Benefits
- 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
- Parental leave