Zappos
Director, Product Management — Forward Deployed Engineering, AWS Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)
United States, MA, Boston; United States, WA, Seattle; United States, CA, East Palo Alto
- Original posting date
- Not recorded
- Last checked
- Not recorded
- Last seen
- Nov 2, 2026
Saved job description
**The Opportunity**
95% of enterprise technology pilots deliver zero measurable P&L impact. The technology works — the gap is in the last mile: getting production systems running inside complex enterprises where legacy infrastructure, regulated data, and organizational complexity collide. AWS is making a billion-dollar investment in Forward Deployed Engineering ("FDE") to close that gap, and we're hiring product leaders who will define what we build and why.
This is a greenfield role. You'll build a product management practice, shape an entirely new category at AWS, and establish the engagement model that delivers delightful outcomes enabling customers to transform themselves.
**The Role**
As the Director of Product Management — Forward Deployed Engineering will lead product management for FDE, building and leading the PM team that owns the end-to-end product lifecycle from customer engagement through production delivery through optimization and self-sufficiency. Your product managers embed directly inside enterprise customers — defining outcomes, writing specs, working hand-in-hand with engineering to ship production systems — and every engagement feeds back into AWS services and an underlying platform that makes the next one faster.
This is not a traditional AWS Product Management role. FDE product managers are field-facing: they live inside delivery, sit with customers, and turn engagement learnings into compounding platform value. You are the "CEO of the customer problem" — responsible for the *why* and *what*, while engineering owns the *how*.
Key job responsibilities
### Product Leadership
You own the customer outcomes. Your teams operate inside customer environments under real constraints and ambitious timelines — regulated data, brownfield infrastructure, multi-stakeholder governance. You lead the customer engagement strategy from the product side: define what a great pod PM does, allocate PM talent across engagements, ensure pods are solving the right problems, and hold executive customer relationships at the CIO/CTO level built on trust earned through delivered outcomes.
### Product & Platform Influence
You see what breaks across deployments and turn that into product direction. You influence AWS service roadmap from a position of earned authority because you've lived the deployment pain firsthand, and identify when custom pod work should graduate into platform primitives or native service capabilities.
You shape the FDE engagement model: how we scope, what we deliver, what we price, what we leave behind.
### Industry Practice & Productization
You build the domain expertise that compounds. Your teams develop industry-specific accelerators, reference architectures, and blueprints that generate pipeline for the next customer in your vertical. You define the use cases that feed qualification, pricing, and pod composition. You measure what matters: asset reuse rate, time-to-value, engagement velocity
### Go-to-Market Partnership
You partner with sales, specialists, and marketing to define pricing, packaging, and positioning. You own the commercial model for FDE engagements — how we price outcomes, what the customer buys, and how we demonstrate ROI. You build pipeline through customer stories, reference architectures
Requirements: - BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field
- 15+ years in product management, with significant experience in enterprise environments
- Track record building and leading product management teams through complex enterprise applications with direct customer and business impact
- Technical depth — agentic systems, AI/ML, business workflow automation, enterprise integration — ability to engage at the architecture level and roll up sleeves when the hardest problems demand it
- Experience with pricing, packaging, and go-to-market — having partnered with sales, marketing, and GTM teams to define commercial models and build pipeline
- Executive presence with C-suite customers, earned through outcomes — can run a room with a VP/CTO and translate business problems into product requirements in real time
Location & listing notes
Locations describe the saved posting and do not confirm residence eligibility. Confirm qualifications, travel, restrictions, and availability with the employer.
Source-listed locations: US, Boston, Massachusetts; US, Seattle, Washington; US, East Palo Alto, California.
Listed states: CA, MA, WA.
This saved listing has not passed full current-posting verification.