Amazon Ads is building an AI creative system designed for personalization and optimization, and is looking for a Principal AI Creative Director (POD) to set the creative quality standard and turn creative direction into teachable, scalable, machine-readable frameworks.
Role Overview
This principal-level individual contributor role partners across design, engineering, science, and product. The position also includes hands-on creation and prototyping across multiple modalities to validate new customer experiences and inform creative tooling and systemization.
Responsibilities
- Define and own the creative quality bar for AI-generated assets across POD’s portfolio, including images, video, copy, and multi-format compositions.
- Build brand intelligence frameworks that help AI outputs remain aesthetically coherent, emotionally resonant, and brand-safe at scale.
- Serve as senior creative editor for AI-generated content by distinguishing exceptional work from “good enough,” expressed in terms that can be decomposed, taught, and systematized.
- Lead the systemization of taste by breaking great creative into constituent elements: narrative structure, color theory, compositional hierarchy, emotional arc, pacing, and brand signal.
- Translate these primitives into structured frameworks such as prompt libraries, creative briefs, quality rubrics, and annotation schemas to support model training, DCO reward signals, and creative tooling.
- Define the primitives used for aesthetic moderation, including signals and thresholds that let systems evaluate, filter, and rank AI-generated content without requiring human review of every asset.
- Partner with applied science and engineering to operationalize the above as machine-readable inputs.
- Produce high-quality creative content independently across modalities (image, video, copy) using leading AI creation tools.
- Prototype with hands-on fluency by building working creative prototypes that surface trade-offs and create decision points for design, product, and engineering leadership.
- Maintain deep, current tool fluency across text-to-image (Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Stable Diffusion), text-to-video (Sora, Runway, Kling), and LLM-powered copy and agentic workflows.
- Partner with design, product, and engineering to define how new AI-powered creative experiences should look and feel for advertisers.
- Translate Creative Vision into CX direction, advising on experience design for advertiser-facing tools including Creative Studio, Video Generator, and the creative agent to ensure capabilities are legible, trustworthy, and creatively empowering.
- Build and own POD’s aesthetic moderation framework, including a multi-dimensional quality scorecard that defines “premium creative” in measurable, auditable terms across visual quality, brand alignment, emotional resonance, and format appropriateness.
- Establish governance processes such as 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.
- Act as the creative authority in cross-functional conversations with engineering, science, product, and design leadership by earning influence through demonstrated quality and creative vision.
- Partner with the Design Technology team so prototypes reflect a high creative bar before moving into engineering roadmaps.
- Collaborate with PAO (Creative Personalization and Optimization) to ensure personalized creative variants maintain quality and brand coherence at impression level.
Required 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 AI content creation work, including major campaigns, brand work, or personal projects showing advanced fluency with generative AI tools across image, video, and copy.
- Ability to produce finished creative content independently across modalities using AI tools, rather than only directing others.
- Deep understanding of what makes great creative, including narrative structure, color theory, compositional hierarchy, emotional arc, pacing, and brand signal, with the ability to articulate these 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.
Technologies
Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Stable Diffusion, Sora, Runway, Kling, LLM-powered copy, agentic workflows, Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), Creative Studio, Video Generator, Figma, Adobe Creative Suite.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in advertising, e-commerce, or performance marketing contexts, including understanding 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 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 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 such as Figma and Adobe Creative Suite to refine, annotate, and communicate creative direction alongside AI-generated outputs.
Compensation and Location
- Location: Culver City, CA (onsite)
- Salary: USD 201,800 - 273,000 per year
- Minimum experience: 10 years
Benefits
- Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs)
- Health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription), Basic Life & AD&D insurance, and option for Supplemental life plans
- EAP and Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line
- Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage
- 401(k) matching
- Paid time off
- Parental leave
