Principal, Strategic Initiatives, Special Projects

Visionaries wanted! Are you an entrepreneur? A dreamer? A builder? This role is on an Amazon Special Projects team that takes the company's Think Big leadership principle to the limit. We focus on creating new businesses with a goal of positively impacting the lives of our customers. No industries or subject areas are out of bounds. If you're interested in innovating at scale to address big challenges in the world, this is the team for you.

At Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have thirteen employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We are constantly learning through programs that are local, regional, and global. Amazon's culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 16 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.

Our team highly values work-life balance, mentorship and career growth. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects and offer training that will challenge you to become your best.

We are recruiting talent to play a key role in identifying and building new businesses at Amazon. We are looking for candidates who thrive in a fast-paced start-up like environment and want to invent the future for Amazon current and future customers. Working backwards from customers, you seek to understand key customer pain points, map potentially non-intuitive solutions to those needs, and leverage Amazon's capabilities and resources to launch and scale new businesses. In this role, you are responsible for writing business reports, new business proposals, and evaluating reports and proposals at a high cadence. This is a high-visibility role in which you pitch new businesses to senior leadership for funding. After achieving funding, you leverage Amazon's resources to building new businesses.

You have experience building a startup from zero-to-one (ideally having achieved revenue), and experience working within or evaluating new areas, startups, and investment opportunities. You have an insatiable appetite to learn new areas, a willingness to dive deep into details, and are quantitative. You are able to credibly engage stakeholders, investors, subject matter experts, and potential customers to form data-driven perspectives on businesses opportunities, and an ability to stay focused and motivated in an ambiguous, highly-dynamic environment. In additional to identifying and diving into innovative technologies, you are comfortable quantifying the business opportunity of ideas. You are adept at distilling complex subjects into easy to understand, actionable written artifacts based on data. Finally, you are willing and able to relocate to Seattle to work with a team in person in the near term. Still interested? Read on, we'd love to speak with you about this incredible opportunity!

NOTE: This role is based in Seattle, Washington and requires you to be physically in the office collaborating with your teammates. We are unable to consider remote/hybrid candidates.

Key job responsibilities

Our team at Amazon is recruiting a highly-versatile candidate to contribute to identifying opportunities for Amazon to build a large, sustainable business.

In this role, you:

Work independently within a small team to identify and qualify promising opportunities for new Amazon businesses.

Perform extensive first-person research independently and with the other members of a team.

Distill learnings from your internal and external research into clearly-written idea proposals for discussions and review.

Pitch rigorous business proposals to leadership for funding.

Post-funding, build a team and grow, launch, and scale a new business.

A day in the life

Over time, your role evolves from research and exploration as an individual contributor to implementation. Initially, you are tasked with bringing well-formed written proposals to the team for review. Once we"ve landed on a problem space and identified a solution that has Amazon-scale potential, you are responsible for building the "working backwards" document that outlines the opportunity and details the resources required to build it.

About the team

Using Amazon's well-known process of working backwards from the customer, the Special Projects team looks across a wide range of industries and topics to develop ideas that Amazon hasn't pursued yet. The Special Projects team uses Amazon's six critical questions to decide which big ideas to develop:

1. Can the proposed solution make people's lives better? We are inclined toward areas that yield widespread positive impact.

2. How many people does it impact? We seek areas that have the potential to impact at least 1% of the global population.

3. Could the business be large enough to "move the needle" for Amazon? We focus on opportunities that can grow into large, sustainable businesses.

4. Is the problem in an area well-served by others? We seek to solve unmet needs.

5. Is our approach to solving the customer's problem differentiated? We develop solutions that are differentiated and often non-intuitive.

6. Why should Amazon do this? We are inclined toward solutions that (in part) leverage our internal expertise.