DESCRIPTION

We are looking for an exceptional leader to join us at our Seattle, WA headquarters to define and build the next generation of the AWS Direct Connect service. This position will be responsible for leading a global organization charged with engineering, operations and deployment activities for the AWS Direct Connect service.

First, a bit of background:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a broad set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and networking services that help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale applications. Our services are trusted by the largest enterprises and the hottest startups to power a wide variety of workloads.

The AWS Direct Connect team delivers solutions that make it easy for customers to establish a dedicated network connection from their premises to the AWS cloud. These connections help to reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections. Direct Connect is currently available in more than 86 locations located in 25 countries.

The opportunity:
The ideal candidate is a seasoned, mature engineering leader who is comfortable building high performing teams and developing staff. The ideal candidate prioritizes well, communicates clearly, and understands how to drive a high level of focus and operational excellence with a strong team. Candidates must have a proven track record of building a culture centered on customer focus, efficient execution, high quality, rigorous testing, monitoring, and solid deployment practices. AWS in general, and this business in particular, operates at very large scale and on critical workloads, so a passion for operational excellence is essential. Candidates must be comfortable with ambiguity and eager to embrace ownership and accountability.

Leading teams in this type of fast-paced environment requires a high degree of autonomy and provides a wide range of opportunities to influence the productivity and morale of your teams. Attitude and work ethic is a key ingredient of success in this role: the successful candidate will be expected to wear many hats, work fast and smart, and adapt and iterate quickly.

Sound like a fit? Read on...
As the leader for Direct Connect network engineering, operations and scaling, your teams own the day to day operation of a critical Tier 0 service relied upon by customer-facing systems as well many internal services, including Amazon Retail. The team is a balanced mix of senior and junior engineers that has proven it can deliver important features for our customers. You will be responsible for building and managing multiple high performing teams in a fast-paced engineering environment that values operational excellence and rapid delivery. Your teams will have ownership of every aspect of building, scaling and operating the Direct Connect network and engineering the next generation our fabric.

You will leverage your experience with cloud-scale networking to define and build secure, reliable, scalable, fast, cost-effective, and easy-to-use solutions that bring the cloud closer to our ever-expanding customer base. You will own staffing and managing the team, setting the team culture, driving the adoption of best practices, and planning and delivering on the product roadmap. You will help set - and will be expected to deliver on - aggressive goals for adoption, operational performance, and feature delivery.

To be successful in this role you will need an established background in managing and leading engineering and operations teams, interacting with enterprise customers, and building cloud-scale networks.

As the leader of the Direct Connect engineering, operations and scaling team, you will have the opportunity to:
• Be great fun to work with. Our company credo is "Work hard. Have fun. Make history". The right candidate will love what they do and instinctively know how to make work fun. Enjoy being a really great people manager. Building, motivating and mentoring a world-class operations and network engineering teams is the most important part of this role. You should have a proven track record in recruiting and retaining top talent and you must be awesome at day-to-day people and performance management tasks.
• Enjoy building large scale networks for demanding customers. Drive the operations and continuous improvement that allows AWS and Amazon retail systems and other mission critical workloads to function without interruption. Identify areas of improvement in our existing frameworks, tools, and processes and strive to make them better. You will enjoy keeping your technical skills reasonably current and can contribute meaningfully to architecture discussions.
• Have strong project management experience. The successful candidate will partner with Product Managers to create product roadmaps for the team. This will include helping innovate and inventing new value-added services. You will need excellent technical project management skills to deliver product roadmap items as well as other cross-team projects.
• Know how to run a tight, lean, efficient operation. The right candidate will want to measure everything and be very data driven. He/she will excel at using metrics, monitoring and alarming to measure and improve the operational processes and performance of the team.
This position has a high level of visibility so you will need to be a strong leader, and be able to communicate clearly and compellingly at all levels of the company.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor Degree in Computer Science or relevant degree/experience
• 10+ years of relevant engineering experience
• 6+ years people management experience or relevant leadership experience
• 3+ years managing managers (leader of leaders)

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Knowledge of major networking protocols, topology design, network hardware and device configuration.
• Excellent analytical skills
• Excellent problem solving and troubleshooting skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Amazon is an Equal Opportunity Employer - Women / Minority / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation / Age.