Senior Technical Program Manager, Ads AI Core Infrastructure

Amazon is hiring a Senior Technical Program Manager, Ads AI Core Infrastructure in New York, United States. It pays $164k-$221k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.

Level's read on this job

Level rates this role Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
The posting mentions AI agents, program management and distributed systems among its tools and skills.
Level classes it as a senior role.
Amazon has 22,000+ other open roles on Level.
This posting went up in the last few days.

AI in this role

Lead technical programs for AI-native data infrastructure powering advertising agents and real-time models.

ai-agentsprogram-managementdistributed-systemsreal-time-dataembeddingsretrieval-systems

Amazon Advertising is investing heavily in building AI-native data infrastructure, and our team sits at the center of that transformation. We own the Ads Real-Time Data Service and Advertiser Profiles: the systems that provide every advertising AI agent with immediate, structured access to advertiser context. Today, advertising agents and skills across Amazon depend on our platform to answer questions about campaign performance, budget allocation, brand positioning, and advertiser behavior within sub-second latency. We process billions of data points daily with 1-3 minute refresh cadences, serving millions of advertisers across all Amazon marketplaces worldwide.

Our team is part of Ads AI Core Infrastructure (ACI), the organization responsible for the foundational systems that make Amazon's advertising AI possible: knowledge bases, runtime environments, agent tooling, and the real-time data layer that connects them all. The programs you will lead span the full lifecycle: from defining the data model and onboarding new advertiser signal types, to coordinating cross-organization launches with agent teams, measurement systems, and advertising console experiences. You will own programs that touch 30+ engineering teams across 10 VP organizations, drive alignment between science teams developing new embedding and retrieval techniques and engineering teams productionizing them, and manage the rollout of platform capabilities to advertising agents and skills across Amazon's global advertising business. The work is technically complex (distributed systems, real-time streaming, large language model optimization), organizationally complex (multiple VP-level stakeholders with competing priorities), and time-sensitive (agent teams are shipping new advertiser experiences weekly and depend on our platform to keep pace).

Key job responsibilities
Program Strategy & Roadmap Ownership

You own the multi-quarter roadmap for Advertiser Data and Profiles across both our team and our partner teams. You define program milestones, success metrics, and delivery timelines. You write and present the program narrative for OP1/OP2 documents and monthly business reviews to Directors and VPs. You make data-driven trade-off recommendations when scope, resources, and timelines conflict, and you drive crisp decisions about what ships now versus what defers.

Cross-Organization Program Delivery

You manage programs spanning our platform engineering team, applied science teams building embedding and retrieval models, agent builder teams consuming our APIs, measurement and attribution teams depending on our data, and advertising console teams surfacing profile data to advertisers directly. You create and maintain program schedules that account for cross-team dependencies, negotiate resource commitments, and drive weekly execution cadence across all workstreams. When programs stall, you diagnose whether the block is technical, organizational, or resource-based, and you drive resolution through the appropriate path.

Technical Program Leadership

You understand distributed systems architecture well enough to participate in design reviews, challenge assumptions about data freshness and consistency guarantees, and ensure that what we commit to delivering is technically feasible within the stated timeline. You work with engineers to decompose large programs into independently deliverable milestones. You ensure that real-time ingestion pipelines, MCP server infrastructure, and profile computation systems meet their availability and latency commitments. You own the launch readiness process for platform features consumed by 30+ downstream teams.

Operational Excellence & Risk Management

You establish and maintain the mechanisms that keep programs healthy: status dashboards, weekly program reviews, escalation criteria, and stakeholder communication cadences. You proactively identify risks weeks before they become blockers and bring mitigation plans. You run retrospectives after major launches and drive the resulting improvements into team process. You own capacity planning coordination across our services during peak advertising seasons.

Stakeholder Communication & Influence

You are the single-threaded owner of program communication to senior leadership. You write documents that clearly articulate scope, timeline, risk, and trade-offs for Directors and VPs. You present at monthly business reviews and operational reviews. You build consensus across teams with different priorities by finding the framing that connects each team's goals to the program outcome. You manage expectations proactively, ensuring leadership is never surprised by delays or scope changes.

A day in the life
Morning: Program Execution and Unblocking

Your day starts with the program dashboard showing 3 of 4 workstreams green and one yellow: the real-time campaign ingestion pipeline is blocked on a schema change from the upstream data warehouse team. You write a concise status update to your Director with the issue, impact to timeline, and your proposed mitigation. You then join a 30-minute stand-up with your cross-team leads where you confirm the data warehouse team has scheduled the schema migration for next sprint. You update the program tracker, adjust the downstream timeline by 3 days, and notify the agent teams that their new campaign signals onboarding date shifted.

Mid-morning, you are in a design review with the platform engineers and an Applied Scientist. They are proposing a new context compression approach for high-cardinality advertiser data that would reduce token consumption by 35% but requires changes to the MCP server response format. You ask questions about backward compatibility, migration path for existing consumers, and latency impact. You determine this needs a phased rollout and work with the team to define the phases and success criteria for each.

Afternoon: Strategic Planning and Stakeholder Alignment

After lunch, you are drafting the Q4 roadmap section for the OP1 narrative. You are framing the Advertiser Profiles expansion in terms of what it enables for advertisers (richer recommendations, faster onboarding to new ad products) rather than the technical components. You coordinate with the product manager on the customer-facing narrative and with the science lead on which profile signals will be ready by launch.

You join a weekly sync with the three agent teams that are your largest consumers. They want real-time access to advertiser creative assets as part of the profile. You assess the engineering cost, negotiate a phased delivery (metadata first, full assets in Q1), and commit to a date for the first phase. You document the agreement and add the work items to the backlog.

Late Afternoon: Operational Reviews and Forward Planning

You run a 45-minute program review with your Director and the partner team leads. You walk through each workstream: what shipped this week, what ships next week, where the risks are. One risk surfaces: the data warehouse team is planning a schema migration that could disrupt our ingestion pipelines during peak season. You escalate this to your VP with a clear ask (timing coordination) and a proposed resolution path.

Before end of day, you review the launch readiness checklist for next week's release of a new profile data type to all advertising agents. Load testing passed, documentation is complete, the rollback plan is reviewed. You approve the launch and send the go/no-go communication to stakeholders.

Basic qualifications

- 5+ years of technical product or program management experience
- 3+ years of software development experience
- 5+ years of technical program management working directly with software engineering teams experience
- Experience managing programs across cross functional teams, building processes and coordinating release schedules
- Experience building and evaluating system-level technical design
- Experience developing and executing/delivering product and technical roadmaps

Preferred qualifications

- 5+ years of project management disciplines including scope, schedule, budget, quality, along with risk and critical path management experience
- Experience defining KPI's/SLA's used to drive multi-million dollar businesses and reporting to senior leadership

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, NY, New York - 163,600.00 - 221,300.00 USD annually
USA, WA, SEATTLE - 148,700.00 - 201,200.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Senior Technical Program Manager, Ads AI Core Infrastructure at Amazon rates 70 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

●●●● 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. Open the description and count.

Key facts

Senior Technical Program Manager, Ads AI Core Infrastructure is an open job at Amazon.
Level rates this role AI Level 3 of 4: Works on AI.
The listed salary is $164k-$221k a year.
The role is based in US, NY, New York.
The job was posted on October 19, 2026.
Seniority: senior.
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

AI agentsProgram ManagementDistributed SystemsReal Time DataEmbeddingsRetrieval Systems

Questions you could be asked

How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
Tell me about a project where program management was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where real time data was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where embeddings was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, Program Management, Distributed Systems, Real Time Data, and Embeddings. 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.
Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

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