Principal AI Creative Director, POD

Amazon Ads seeks a Principal AI Creative Director for Personalization Optimization and Design (POD) to define what exceptional AI-generated creative looks like and to render that standard teachable, scalable, and machine-readable. This is a hands-on leadership role at the center of Amazon's AI creative system, where cross-functional collaboration with design, engineering, science, and product leadership across every POD surface shapes how advertisers experience AI-driven creativity. The position blends high-impact creative judgment with the development of structured frameworks that govern and optimize AI-generated assets at scale.

Location

New York, NY (onsite)

Compensation

USD 201,800 - 273,000 per year

Responsibilities

• Serve as the central human judgment layer within Amazon's AI creative system for POD, guiding quality and direction.
• Define and codify what outstanding AI-generated creative looks like, making it teachable, scalable, and machine-readable across the platform.
• Operate as a principal-level individual contributor with broad influence, partnering directly with design, engineering, science, and product leadership across POD surfaces.
• Set and own the creative quality bar for AI-generated assets spanning images, video, copy, and multi-format compositions.
• Establish brand intelligence frameworks to ensure AI outputs are aesthetically coherent, emotionally resonant, and brand-safe at scale.
• Act as the senior creative editor for AI-generated content, differentiating exceptional work from merely acceptable outputs and articulating the distinction in decomposable terms.
• Lead the Systemization of Taste by decomposing great creative into 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 that inform model training and creative tooling.
• Define the primitives that power aesthetic moderation, establishing signals and thresholds to evaluate, filter, and rank AI content with minimal human review.
• Collaborate with applied science and engineering to operationalize these inputs as machine-readable signals.
• Produce high-quality creative content independently across image, video, and copy using leading AI creation tools.
• Apply hands-on prototyping to demonstrate new customer experiences, surface trade-offs, and inform decisions across design, product, and engineering leadership.
• Contribute to a demo-driven culture where prototypes move decisions, not just direct others within it.
• Maintain 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.
• Partner with design, product, and engineering to define new AI-powered creative experiences for advertisers.
• Translate Creative Vision into Customer Experience direction for interacting with a generative creative system.
• Advise on the experience design for advertiser-facing tools, including Creative Studio, Video Generator, and the creative agent, ensuring AI capabilities are legible, trustworthy, and empowering.
• Build and own the aesthetic moderation framework for POD: a multi-dimensional quality scorecard covering 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 every asset to be reviewed by humans.
• Collaborate with advertiser-facing teams to translate brand requirements into creative direction that AI systems can operationalize and enforce.
• Serve as the creative authority in cross-functional conversations with engineering, science, product, and design leadership, earning influence through demonstrated quality and vision.
• Partner with the Design Technology team to ensure 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 the impression level.

Requirements

• 10+ years of creative direction experience with a portfolio that demonstrates exceptional craft across visual design, brand identity, advertising, or digital creative.
• 2+ years of hands-on AI content creation, including major campaigns, brand work, or personal projects, showing fluency with generative AI tools across image, video, and copy.
• Ability to produce finished creative content independently across modalities using AI tools, not solely 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 elements in precise, teachable terms.
• Experience at the intersection of creative and technology, collaborating with engineering, product, or data science teams to build creative systems.
• Proven ability to influence without formal authority in large, cross-functional organizations.
• Minimum 2 years of relevant experience as indicated by the role’s requirements.

Technologies

• Midjourney
• Adobe Firefly
• Stable Diffusion
• Sora
• Runway
• Kling
• Figma
• Adobe Creative Suite

Benefits

• Sign-on payments
• Restricted stock units (RSUs)
• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription)
• Basic Life & AD&D insurance with option for Supplemental life plans
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Mental Health Support
• Medical Advice Line
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage
• 401(k) matching
• Paid time off
• Parental leave