Principal, Strategic Initiatives, Special Projects

Amazon is hiring a Principal, Strategic Initiatives, Special Projects in Boston, United States. It pays $180k-$243k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Amazon.

Level's read on this job

Little AI ●○○○ is how Level rates this role: aI is not part of the work.
The posting mentions business strategy, startup building and quantitative analysis among its tools and skills.
Level classes it as a lead role.
Amazon has 20,000+ other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

Drive special strategic initiatives and new business creation from zero to one within an Amazon special projects team.

business-strategystartup-buildingquantitative-analysisstakeholder-engagementleadership

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!

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.

Basic qualifications

- Bachelor's degree
- Experience owning/driving roadmap strategy and definition
- Experience with feature delivery and tradeoffs of a product
- Experience technical product management
- 10+ years of end to end product delivery experience

Preferred qualifications

- Experience working directly with Engineers on product enhancements
- Experience in project management methodologies, business analysis, or process improvement

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. 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. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including 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, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

USA, MA, Boston - 179,900.00 - 243,400.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Principal, Strategic Initiatives, Special Projects at Amazon rates 0 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

Principal, Strategic Initiatives, Special Projects is an open job at Amazon.
Level rates this role AI Level 1 of 4: Little AI.
The listed salary is $180k-$243k a year.
The role is based in US, MA, Boston.
The job was posted on October 5, 2026.
Seniority: lead.
Applications are handled by Amazon. Apply on Amazon

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Business StrategyStartup BuildingQuantitative AnalysisStakeholder EngagementLeadership

Questions you could be asked

Tell me about a project where business strategy was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where startup building was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where quantitative analysis was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where stakeholder engagement was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where leadership was part of your work. What did you do?

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List these exact terms on your resume: Business Strategy, Startup Building, Quantitative Analysis, Stakeholder Engagement, and Leadership. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.

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