Sr. Customer Success Specialist, Applied AI, AWS WWSO CDS

Description

This position is part of the AWS Specialist and Partner Organization (ASP). Specialists own the end-to-end go-to-market strategy for their respective technology domains, providing the business and technical expertise to help our customers succeed. Partner teams own the strategy, recruiting, development, and growth of our key technology and consulting partners. Together they provide our customers with the expertise and scale needed to build innovative solutions for their most complex challenges.

AWS is seeking an experienced Customer Success Specialist for Communication Developer Services (CDS), covering AWS End User Messaging and Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), with a focus on Applied AI. CDS lets customers reach their audiences across every major channel (email, SMS, RCS, push, and WhatsApp) at scale. As communication moves from one-way notifications toward conversational and agentic AI, customer success is where that transformation is realized in production. As a CDS Customer Success Specialist, you will be a strategic advisor who helps customers onboard, ramp, and optimize their messaging and AI-driven communication workloads, leading cross-functional field teams across sales, solutions architecture, partner, and product.

The ideal candidate will have customer success, technical account management, or consulting experience with messaging, communications, or similar SaaS solutions (CPaaS, SMS/messaging, marketing technology, CRM/CDP), and a genuine interest in how AI is reshaping customer engagement. You bring technical depth, comfortable getting hands-on with the services, reasoning about architecture and integration, and guiding customers through configuration and troubleshooting, and you partner with Solutions Architects on the most specialized builds. You are passionate about customer advocacy and bring the voice of the customer into the product development process.

Note on the Applied AI focus: this role centers on leading customer adoption of AI-driven communication and realizing value from it — hands-on AI-practitioner experience (e.g. data scientist or ML engineer) is welcome but not the focus.

Key job responsibilities
- Serve as the primary point of contact for a portfolio of strategic customer accounts, acting as a strategic advisor and driving enterprise-wide adoption of CDS services.
- Own onboarding and ramp. Drive time-to-first-value, remove technical and operational blockers, and coordinate with SA and support to get customers to production quickly.
- Own the expand & churn motion. Monitor customer health and adoption, forecast usage, identify growth opportunities, and address at-risk accounts before churn, while meeting annual revenue and retention targets.
- Guide customers adopting conversational and agentic-AI communication patterns, helping them apply AI-driven engagement responsibly on top of CDS channels.
- Build repeatable, scalable assets such as playbooks, best-practices, and reusable programs, so adoption patterns work across your portfolio rather than one account at a time.
- Deliver compelling presentations, product demos, sample solutions and programs, events, and discussions to enable customer success.
- Build customer skills and proficiency with CDS (deliverability, compliance, and multi-channel best practices).
- Engage with senior stakeholders to understand the value proposition of CDS and uncover new areas of business value.
- Develop account plans in conjunction with field teams, and work with partners and ISVs to extend reach and drive adoption of AWS solutions.

A day in the life
Your morning starts in your portfolio's health dashboard: one account's send volume dipped, another stalled in onboarding. You jump on a working session with a Solutions Architect to clear a deliverability blocker and get a customer to production. Midday, you advise a customer's senior stakeholders on their roadmap from one-way messaging toward conversational and agentic AI on CDS channels, then build the account plan with your sales team. Afternoon, you turn a repeatable pattern into a playbook that scales across your portfolio, deliver a demo that unblocks another account, and bring the voice of the customer back to product.

About the team
We're the Communication Developer Services (CDS) go-to-market team, covering AWS End User Messaging and Amazon SES. Our mission is to help customers reach their audiences across every major channel, including email, SMS, RCS, and WhatsApp, at scale, and to guide them as communication shifts from one-way notifications toward conversational and agentic AI. We're a highly distributed team spread across many locations, and we work as one field unit alongside sales, solutions architecture, partners, and product. We value curiosity, customer obsession, and builders who turn what they learn with one customer into something the whole portfolio can use.

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.

Basic Qualifications

- 5+ years of leading large-scale, technical or engineering programs with a proven record of thought leadership, business case development, realizing customer benefits, and successful program completion experience
- 5+ years of customer-facing work, engaging with customer executives, technologists or partners to solve business problems with advanced technologies experience
- Bachelor's degree in science, technology, engineering, math, business or equivalent
- Experience leading technical and non-technical transformation project teams with a proven ability to work across broad functional teams

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience implementing cloud services including migrations and modernization projects or similar
- 5+ years with messaging, communications, or CPaaS technology (SMS, push, email, or similar).
- Experience managing a portfolio against retention and net-revenue-retention (churn/expansion) targets.
- Familiarity with applied AI in customer engagement — conversational AI, agentic workflows, or AI-driven personalization.
- Hands-on familiarity with AWS End User Messaging, Amazon SES, or comparable messaging/email platforms.

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

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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, CA, East Palo Alto - 176,600.00 - 239,000.00 USD annually
USA, CA, Irvine - 153,600.00 - 207,800.00 USD annually
USA, CA, San Francisco - 176,600.00 - 239,000.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Seattle - 153,600.00 - 207,800.00 USD annually