Amazon Web Services Blog

Jobs at Amazon: Business Development Manager

We have an opening for another Business Development Manager on the Amazon Web Services Team. Here is the official job description:

Business Development Manager - Amazon Web Services

Would you like to be part of a team focused on increasing awareness and adoption of Amazon Web Services by developing strategic partnerships with the largest and most influential software companies in the world?

Do you have the business savvy and a deep software development technical background necessary to help establish Amazon as a key web services provider?

As a business development manager in Amazon Web Services (AWS), you will have the opportunity to help shape and deliver on a strategy to build mind share and broad use of AWS (including Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2) within various software developer segments and communities. Your responsibilities will include helping to define key partnerships to target, establishing those technical relationships, and managing the day-to-day interactions in order to build long-term business and marketing opportunities.

The ideal candidate will posses both a technical background that enables them to easily interact with software developers and a demonstrated ability to think strategically about business, product, and technical challenges - with the ability to build compelling value propositions.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Serve as a key member of the Business Development team in helping to drive overall AWS market and technical strategy Understand the AWS market segments, customer base, and industry verticals we target.
• Set strategic business development plan for target markets and ensure it's in line with the AWS strategic direction.
• Execute the strategic business development plan while working with key internal stakeholders (e.g. service teams, legal, support, etc.
• Identify specific prospects/partners to approach with a technical value proposition for using web services.
• Work with specific prospects to educate, and enable them for using AWS APIs to build their business upon.
• Fill the business development pipeline by engaging with prospects, partners, and key customers.
• Work closely with the customer base to ensure they are successful using our web services, making sure they have the technical resources required.
• Understand the technical requirements of our customers and work closely with the internal development team to guide the direction of our product offerings for developers.
• Understand and exploit the use of salesforce.com and other internal Amazon systems.
• Prepare and give business reviews to the senior management team regarding progress and roadblocks to closing new customers.
• Manage complex contract negotiations and serve as a liaison to the legal group Develop long-term strategic partnerships in support of our key markets.
• Handle ad-hoc incoming inquiries into the AWS email alias and qualify them as potential AWS business development targets.

Your qualifications:

• Highly technical and analytical.
• 5-7 years of partner/business development and/or program/product management experience.
• Experience working within the software development industry.
• Strong verbal and written communications skills are a must, as well as the ability to work effectively across internal and external organizations.
• Technical degree required; MBA and Computer Science or Math background highly desired.
• Working knowledge of web services technology and software development tools and technologies highly desired.

To apply for this position, send your resume to webservicesresumes@amazon.com .

-- Jeff;

Visiting London

Jeff's idea in the post below this one is so good that I am trying the same thing. Check out the wiki at http://s3.amazonaws.com/s3wiki/wiki/MikeCulverLondonMay2007

I plan to be in London to speak at Internet World on either May 1 or May 2 (which day is not finalized yet). I'll be speaking about Amazon Web Services (of course) , and am able to do the same with you or your group. Accordingly this is an opportunity for community scheduling.

You are invited to schedule me for a meeting, a user group presentation, classroom visit, a pint, or whatever else makes sense. Simply edit the wiki page and add your event (make certain I can travel to your appointment from whatever else is on the calendar, with time to spare). Happy to correspond privately if you don't want to post to the wiki. Simply email awseditor at amazon.com.

-- Mike

Coming to Washington DC in June, Help Build the Schedule

I'm going to try a little experiment.

Other than one Linux user group, we haven't done a whole lot of speaking or meetings in the metropolitan Washington, DC area. I do have a few emails from people who would like me to come present if I am ever in the area, but nothing concrete yet.

As an example of the kinds of meetings that I am looking for, take a look at my Utah Trip.

I am going to outline a trip, and would like to invite anyone  interested in meeting with me or in having me speak to their group, organization, or company, to use a couple of social networking tools to fill up my calendar! I usually end up sending and receiving dozens of emails when I plan a week-long evangelization trip. I'd like to reduce that number substantially if at all possible.

Here are the parameters and ground rules:

• I'll arrive late in the day on Monday the 4th of June.
• I'll depart at mid-day on Friday the 8th of June.
• My center of gravity will be Bethesda.
• Looking for user groups and private meetings.
• I know traffic is bad; leave adequate room between meetings.

Ok, now here are your tools:

• Renkoo
• Planypus
• Wiki Page

This is, of course, user-generated content taken to the extreme -- a user-generated calendar, if you will. Let's see if the people who read this blog can help me to create a worthwhile week for me!

I posted a very bare-bones schedule outline on the Wiki page. Put yourself on there, and use one of the other tools to recruit attendees and to coordinate a time. Make sure that I have address and contact information.

Of course, if your office building has 5 sides or your agency name has 3 letters and you don't want to share all of the details, enter a somewhat opaque description on the Wiki, and send me an email with the details.

-- Jeff;

Tuesday Links

Some good stuff queued up:

• Kyle Hayes has a new version of his Flash-powered AmazonRank widget. The new version displays product details when clicked, and can also jump to the Amazon detail page for the product. Full source code is available here.
• The Cruxy Player for Second Life is a portable giveaway for use at live and recorded music events. Supports a variety of music and playlist formats, easily customized, skinned, and embedded, available for free, supports real-world purchases, and it streams data directly out of Amazon S3.
• While on the topic of Second Life, Eric Rice recently rolled out an Amazon-powered store on Pontiac's Motorati Island.
• BrowseGoods (currently in beta) is a very nice visual Amazon catalog browser. The beta provides access to Amazon's shoes, sports, toys, and watches categories. Using the site you can start at the category level and then zoom in until you can see and select from individual items.
   

-- Jeff;

Links Galore

Here are some great links that I have been saving up for the last week or two:

• Last week I recorded a podcast with Doug Kaye and Phil Windley. We talked about Amazon S3, Amazon SQS, and Amazon EC2, and then we discussed Doug's new podcast processing system. You should listen to the whole think to get all of the details, but a few things about this podcast are especially noteworthy. First, Doug said that it was fun to implement the complex architecture pictured in this diagram. Second, he claimed that he spent less than $100 on Amazon services during the development process!
• Steve Odom wrote about Using Capistrano to Manage EC2 Instances. He'll be using this as part of his soon-to-be-launched site, Quizzical.net . Capistrano is a Ruby tool which simplifies the deployment of development code to production servers. Steve has also written about Using S3 as a Cache Store and Seven Steps to Use S3 as a Media Server.
• Frances Shanahan posted an excerpt from his Amazon.com Mashups book. Read all about A Generic Storage Solution Using Amazon S3. If you have already read this book, consider posting a review.
• Mike Migursky forced his iMac to spend the entire weekend sub-dividing and then uploading NASA's Blue Marble imagery to S3. He's now running a Special on Blue Marble Tiles, Aisle Six. Mike has generously made this data available for free, asking only that you make your own copy if you want to do any heavy-duty processing.
• We published a tech note on Optimizing Amazon S3 Performance With Small Objects. Being an old Linux geek, I searched in vain for a way to change this setting on the client side (for that particular case). I didn't find one, and that may be just as well. The various protocols and practices at the TCP-IP level are remarkably well thought-out and making this change would actually be a tiny bit anti-social.
• Finally, while in Utah last week (more info here) Brad Baldwin of Rocky Mountain Voices did a video recording of my impromptu 5 minute talk. Earlier that week I also recorded an audio podcast with Kip Meacham, also of Rocky Mountain Voices. I will post a link to that one just as soon as it is online.
• One more thing, added minutes afterward. My friend Jeffrey McManus wrote to tell me that his very cool Approver.com is now using Amazon S3 for document storage.

Ok, I am supposed to be taking it easy today, so I'd better sign off!

-- Jeff;

Four New Articles in the Resource Center

As part of our new Developer Voice program, we have been working with members of the AWS developer community to create some new content for the Resource Center. Here are the first four articles:

• Building a Web Application with Ruby on Rails and Amazon S3 - This article provides a tutorial on integrating the Amazon S3 REST API for Ruby with the Ruby on Rails web application framework to create a web management user interface for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
• Building a Struts-Based Web Application on Amazon S3 - This article provides a tutorial on integrating the Amazon S3 REST API for Java with the Struts web application framework to create a web management user interface to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
• Integrating Amazon Mechanical Turk into Windows Workflow Foundation - With Amazon Mechanical Turk, you can easily outsource tasks that are considered difficult for the computer, but easy for a person. These tasks are called Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). Amazon Mechanical Turk takes care of the outsourcing, but how can you integrate these tasks in your workflow?
• Making Money with Amazon ECS, the Associates Program, and PHP - Amazon E-Commerce Service (Amazon ECS) offers a flexible view into the enormous amount of information that Amazon offers. By using this data in creative ways on your site, you can entice more visitors to purchase your merchandise. Your payoff comes when you tie in your Amazon Associates tag to each one of these purchases.

If you would like to write an article of your own, contact us through the Recommend an Article link here.

-- Jeff;

Help Find Jim Gray

I'm reposting this announcement from Werner's blog in an effort to get it in front of as many people as possible:

Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.

Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly. We have split these images into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned visually and stored into the Amazon S3 storage service. We then created tasks for reviewing these images and loaded then into the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service.

This is where you come in. We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Jim’s boat in any of these images. Please go to the Amazon Mechanical Turk site and help us find Jim Gray.

The weather conditions were not ideal as some areas were cloudy, but we can still look for him in those places where there is a somewhat clear view. We hope to get more satellite data in the coming days of a wider area. The current images are panchromatic with a 0.82m, and Jim boat would be about 6 pixels in size. Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site for more details.

I have to stress that many individuals and companies are to thank for making this possible; many academics friends relentlessly worked around the clock to get access to the data, many industry friends of Jim functioned as connectors to hook up officials and individuals, and people from NASA, Digital Globe, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon and others worked hard get to the data collected and available on a very short time scale. The Mechanical Turk team worked deep into the night to make this work.

Now it is your turn, go find Jim Gray.

Updates:

1. New York Times has the back-story:: Silicon Valley’s High-Tech Hunt for Colleague.
2. Direct Link to HIT.
3. Central tracking blog: Tenacious Search.
4. Additional data sets will apparently be coming online via Mechanical Turk over the weekend.
5. The new data has been loaded and you can find it here. I have also updated the links above (back to the originals :-).
6. More of this story on TechCrunch.

-- Jeff;