20 years at Amazon, then a $1M+ Director of Engineering offer

After nearly 20 years at Amazon, our client knew he was ready for a bigger role.

The problem was finding the time to actually go get it.

He was an L7 Senior Manager at Prime Video, leading work across media supply chain and generative AI. He wanted to move into a Director or Senior Director role, but there wasn't a clear path to that internally.

So he started looking outside.

A serious search is a full-time job on its own

Then he ran into the problem almost every senior leader with a demanding job understands: a serious executive search can become a full-time job on its own.

Researching companies. Finding hiring managers. Figuring out which roles are actually worth pursuing. Customizing applications. Following up. Preparing for interviews.

He didn't have hours every day to do all of that.

And when he tried applying himself, the results were underwhelming.

“Just throwing my resume in the big bucket of resumes didn't help much.”

A former hiring manager who doubted cold outreach

There was another reason he was skeptical of our approach. He had been a hiring manager himself and knew what happened to unsolicited emails. In his experience, external messages often got ignored because hiring managers were already overwhelmed with them.

So we had to prove that targeted outreach and persistent follow-up could actually create a different outcome.

We identified the right people, reached out directly, followed up consistently, and kept the search focused around roles where his Prime Video, large-scale systems and AI experience would carry weight.

Within 60 days, he had gone through 10 interviews with companies including Zscaler, Databricks, Roku, American Express, EY-Parthenon, Roblox and others.

Staying in Seattle

He also had another constraint: Seattle.

He wanted to stay there with his family, even though many of the opportunities at this level were concentrated in the Bay Area.

Eventually, he accepted a Director of Engineering, AI role focused on building an AI platform from scratch, with a $315K base and $700K+ in RSUs, taking his total compensation to $1M+.

The role gave him the title progression he wanted, kept him in Seattle, and put him directly into the kind of AI platform work he was looking for.

The best part was that companies were still reaching out even after he had accepted the offer.

For senior leaders, the challenge is often finding the time and the right distribution strategy to make a career move while you're still busy running your current organization.

That's exactly where a managed search can make a difference.

If you're a senior technology leader with a demanding full-time job and don't have the time to run a serious search yourself, we’ll do it for you.