AWS is seeking an experienced and strategic Sr Manager to lead our Partner Success Specialists (PSS) team, a critical function within the AWS Specialists & Partners (ASP) organization. This role will manage a global team of Partner Success Specialists who leverage our partner network to drive measurable business value for customers. As a post-sales leader, you will be responsible for ensuring partners successfully deliver customer outcomes, accelerate adoption of AWS services, and build referenceable success stories that demonstrate the power of Partner Led Customer Success (PLCS).
This is a unique opportunity to scale a new capability at AWS, creating and learning in an emerging space while driving a mindset shift across broader organizations. You will lead a distributed team across multiple geographies, driving discipline in pipeline management, executive engagement, and value realization while making critical judgment calls on complex partner and customer situations. The ideal candidate brings deep partner ecosystem experience, sales management expertise, and the ability to operate at the executive level with both partners and customers. This leader must be comfortable leading a team that increasingly leverages AI to scale impact over time.
Key job responsibilities
Team Leadership & Development
- Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing global team of Partner Success Specialists, fostering a culture of customer obsession, partner collaboration, and continuous learning
- Conduct regular one-on-ones, performance reviews, and career development conversations to help team members grow their skills and advance their careers
- Recruit, hire, and onboard top talent to scale the team as business needs evolve
- Drive team engagement and retention through mentorship, recognition, and creating opportunities for professional growth
- Enable the team to effectively leverage AI agents and automation to scale their impact and efficiency over time
Sales Management & Pipeline Discipline
- Lead weekly pipeline calls to review partner and customer engagement opportunities, forecast outcomes, and identify risks and mitigation strategies
- Establish clear goals, quotas, and success metrics for the team, ensuring alignment with broader ASP and AWS objectives
- Implement and maintain rigorous pipeline hygiene practices, ensuring accurate forecasting and reporting on PLCS engagements
- Analyze performance data and metrics to identify trends, optimize resource allocation, and drive continuous improvement
Partner & Customer Engagement
- Build and maintain executive relationships with strategic partners, engaging at the C-suite level to build trust and drive long-term collaboration
- Make judgment calls on complex partner or customer situations, providing guidance to PSS team members when conflicts or open questions arise
- Collaborate with partners to co-create customer success strategies that deliver measurable business value and drive incremental AWS consumption
- Build and maintain trusted relationships with partner leadership teams, understanding their business models and aligning on mutual success criteria
Value Realization & Customer Outcomes
- Drive the primary success metric: number of partner led customer engagements that deliver measurable business value to customers
- Provide feedback from partners and customer engagements to enable continuous improvement of PLCS assets and methodologies
- Champion the creation of case studies and referenceable customers that showcase PLCS success stories
- Track and report on incremental consumption and usage driven through PLCS engagements
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Partner with AWS account teams, including Account Managers (AMs) and Solutions Architects (SAs), to ensure alignment at the customer level and orchestrate resources to drive customer outcomes
- Partner with AWS partner management teams, including Partner Development Managers (PDMs), Partner Solutions Architects (PSAs), and Partner Success Managers (PSMs), to ensure alignment at the partner practice level and enable smooth transitions once partner readiness on business is established
- Collaborate with domain-level Customer Success teams to share insights and best practices
- Work with marketing and communications teams to amplify partner success stories and build awareness of PLCS capabilities
- Engage with AWS leadership to share insights, report on program performance, and advocate for resources and support
Innovation & Change Leadership
- Embrace the ambiguity of building a new capability at AWS, demonstrating comfort with creating and learning in an emerging space
- Drive a mindset shift across broader AWS organizations about the value and impact of PLCS
- Champion the adoption of AI agents and automation to scale team effectiveness and customer impact
- Identify opportunities to evolve the program as it expands to new partner types and use cases
A day in the life
You start your day reviewing the weekly pipeline report, preparing for your team's pipeline call where you'll discuss active partner and customer engagements across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas. During the call, you coach a PSS through a complex situation with a partner where there's a potential conflict on customer engagement scope, helping them navigate the conversation and make the right call for the customer.
Later, you join an executive meeting with a strategic partner's leadership team to discuss their customer success practice and how AWS can enable them to scale. You share insights from your team's engagements and co-create a plan to expand their capabilities. In the afternoon, you review a draft case study with one of your PSS team members, providing feedback to ensure it clearly articulates the measurable business value delivered to the customer. You then join a partner+customer call to check-in on an in-progress engagement to assess progress and unblock any blockers.
You wrap up the day with a one-on-one with a team member who's exploring how to use AI agents to automate routine partner communications, discussing opportunities to pilot this approach across the team. Throughout the day, you're making decisions, removing roadblocks, and ensuring your team has what they need to drive PLCS at scale.
About the team
Diverse Experiences
AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.
Why AWS?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses.
Inclusive Team Culture
AWS values curiosity and connection. Our employee-led and company-sponsored affinity groups promote inclusion and empower our people to take pride in what makes us unique. Our inclusion events foster stronger, more collaborative teams. Our continual innovation is fueled by the bold ideas, fresh perspectives, and passionate voices our teams bring to everything we do.
Mentorship & Career Growth
We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.
Work/Life Balance
We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.
