AWS VP Jay Shankar on how Amazon's Leadership Principles drive career growth and innovation

The professional growth and career opportunities at Amazon Web Services (AWS) are endless, especially if you're committed to this core belief: Amazon’s Leadership Principles will help you achieve your goals.

I had no experience in the talent acquisition space when I joined AWS in 2018. Yet, the organization saw enough value in me to hire me as vice president of talent acquisition. My story is the epitome of why Amazon’s Leadership Principles, or LPs as we commonly refer to them, impact everything from innovation to inclusion to each employee’s career development and professional fulfillment. Our LPs guide our work culture and our decision-making, and they’re the foundation of our success.

I started my career in management consulting and led global customer experience prior to coming to AWS. I didn’t initially see how my experience would translate into a talent acquisition organization, but AWS was looking for leadership skills. The value proposition for me was about scaling the organization’s functional expertise through technology. How I would ultimately do that depended on my ability to put these core LPs at the forefront of everything I do.  

An AWS team recently asked me to describe my favorite LP. It’s challenging to choose just one—and I’d be remiss not to mention that all LPs are anchored by the Customer Obsession LP—but Learn and Be Curious, Dive Deep, and Ownership stand out for me because they’re essential to everything we do. The chances are high that you’ve been applying these LPs to your work for a long time because they’re foundational to our success as professionals and human beings.

Learn and Be Curious has been a significant part of my daily life at AWS. Building a career here is about absorbing as much as you can and figuring out how it helps you do your job better. And because I came from a different professional background, I’ve experienced so many situations in which I had to learn something new that Learn and Be Curious has become the backbone of my AWS career. We have a peculiar culture and technology that is always evolving, so the Learn and Be Curious LP speaks to this ability to understand how things work and have the patience to spend the time to learn and understand.

Dive Deep is another LP crucial to our success. I think of it as an eagerness to dig into each learning opportunity and every detail, across all levels of the organization, recognizing that no task is beneath me. We’re always looking for talent with transferable skills, but we also believe that as long as you have the core ability to grow, learn, and dive deep, you can be successful here.

Finally, Ownership is an LP that can influence every person’s success at AWS. Because we expect employees across all levels to act as leaders, we also expect them to be owners. We’re looking for people who can talk to and influence executives, but also have the ability to roll up their sleeves and get into the data to understand the operational aspects of our work. Owners are leaders who are optimizing for the short-term while always considering the long-term. Especially given the scale and size of AWS, we need leaders who have the ability to span multiple levels.

Striving to embody the Amazon LPs is a life-long professional journey. For anyone considering AWS as an employer or preparing for an interview with us, think about how you’ve demonstrated these guiding principles in your previous roles. It’s these real-life professional examples that will help our AWS hiring managers learn more about your willingness to never stop learning, growing, and improving.