Amazon Ads is one of our fastest growing businesses. Amazon Advertising offers advertisers a rich array of media solutions and premium video across both entertainment, gaming and Live Sports. The insights we deliver to advertisers and their partners enable them to build unique connection with consumers, from first discovery to loyalty in a unique and compelling way versus any other media platform at scale. We believe that advertising, when done well, enhances the customer experience with delightful discovery for consumers and compelling performance for advertisers. Within this business, the Video Sales Specialist (VSS) team leads our excellence in Video sales.
The Head of VSS, UK represents Amazon Ads' most senior VSS leadership position in the UK. You will drive adoption of Amazon's full video advertising portfolio — including Prime Video, Live Sports, Streaming TV (STV), Twitch, and third-party OLV/STV — positioning Amazon as the number one premium streaming destination for UK advertisers. This is a role for a recognized authority in video and programmatic advertising who operates comfortably at the highest levels of commercial and strategic complexity, and act as the definitive expert voice for video and streaming advertising in the UK market. You will close landmark deals, shape long-term advertiser partnerships, define the UK video sales narrative, and build the team and mechanisms that make all of it scalable, partnering deeply with cross functional, Agency and sales teams. This role requires a strategic leader who can drive transformational video advertising adoption while building and developing a high-performing team. The role demands both exceptional individual contributor capabilities and proven people leadership excellence.
Key job responsibilities
As the Head of VSS UK you will lead, shape, and scale the UK's video advertising sales capability across Amazon Ads' full portfolio. Your responsibilities span strategic vision, executive relationship management, team leadership, and cross-functional execution at the highest level of ambiguity and complexity.
Team Leadership & People Development
•Hire, onboard, develop, and retain a high-performing team of VSS across the UK, creating a talent pipeline and career development framework that consistently raises the bar;
• Set clear team priorities and individual performance expectations aligned to UK country goals; coach specialists on objective-based selling (OBS), executive engagement, and video product mastery;
• Lead by example as a force multiplier: translate your own experience closing high-value video and streaming deals into repeatable mechanisms, coaching moments, and team-wide capability uplift;
• Actively participate in promotion evaluation, career coaching, and hiring loops; sponsor talent development through official and non-official mentoring and advocate for team growth at the organizational level.
• Foster a culture of operational excellence, intellectual rigor, and customer obsession; model Amazon Leadership Principles in every team interaction and decision.
Strategic Vision & Commercial Leadership
• Act as the primary thought leader and senior executive voice for video and streaming advertising within Amazon Ads UK, driving the overall sales vision, value proposition, and local go-to-market strategy across all video properties, partering deeply with the regional Sales Go To Market function.
• Own and develop the UK video sales strategy and long-term advertiser agreement structures that drive sustained investment in Amazon's video portfolio.
• Develop bespoke industry strategies, incorporating cross-locale best practice sharing, competitive intelligence, and market-specific insight to ensure Amazon's offerings are differentiated and compelling.
• Contribute to the end-to-end strategy for the positioning, pricing, packaging, and planning of Amazon's video advertising offerings, including Prime Video, Live Sports, STV, and third-party inventory.
• Drive innovation to position Prime Video as the number one streaming service in the UK and a premier long-term growth opportunity for brands — developing creative integration ideas, unique sponsorships, and brand partnership opportunities in collaboration with the Brand Partnerships team.
• Represent Amazon Ads at major UK and European industry events, Upfront commitments, and senior advertiser forums; lead the team's presence at key market moments to build brand credibility and drive annual video investment commitments.
Executive Relationship Management & Sales Execution
• Deliver the highest level of sales performance and client service, with a direct focus on UK business hubs, C-suite engagement, and executive relationship stewardship at CMO, CEO, and VP-level.
• Personally own and close high-value, structurally complex video advertising partnerships that require senior influence, multi-stakeholder navigation, and long-horizon deal architecture.
• Align to the UK's most strategically important, sophisticated, and highest-spending/highest-potential accounts; lead engagement on accounts requiring senior-level influence and structural adoption change.
• Translate UK advertiser requirements, and regional competitive dynamics into actionable insight for US-led product teams; ensure UK perspectives meaningfully shape product decisions.
• Manage engagement between service and operations teams on new and emerging video products to deliver best-in-class advertiser experiences.
• Partner with LCS and GTM to develop compelling narratives that differentiate Amazon Ads' unique video offerings; extend influence to global stakeholders when UK or EU-based companies operate across regions.
• Influence multiple external and internal senior leaders across the LCS sales organization, partner-team roadmaps, and global product decisions; initiate, nurture, and lead strategic business initiatives that extend beyond the immediate UK scope.
Execution Excellence & Operational Mastery
• Apply a deep, current understanding of 1P and 3P measurement tools, programmatic video, and streaming attribution to build credibility with both technical and commercial stakeholders.
• Audit, streamline, and optimize cross-organizational structures and mechanisms: take manual processes to automated, reduce operational overhead, and create efficiencies that benefit the full VSS organization.
◦ Handle significantly complex escalations, commercial trade-offs, and stakeholder conflicts with independence and discernment; deconstruct ambiguity into appropriate simplicity to prevent roadblocks before they materialize.
◦ Own the UK VSS contribution to MBR, WBR, QBR, and strategic planning documents (OP1/OP2); produce and contribute to 2-pagers, 6-pagers, and PR/FAQs in the Amazon Amazonian business writing style.
• Accurately forecast, track, and report against annual revenue goals and quarterly pacing targets; ensure the team maintains rigorous CRM hygiene and account planning standards.
Communication Mastery
• Communicate significantly complex information — trade-offs, strategy, results, and plans — with clarity and conviction to direct and indirect stakeholders ranging from individual sellers to VP-level senior leaders.
• Build consensus across diverse, sometimes conflicting, stakeholder groups; align teams around coherent strategies and harmonize discordant views at pace.
• Customize communication style, narrative framing, and meeting structure for advertiser C-suite, agency leadership, Amazon product teams, and global sales leadership — always anticipating the audience's needs and questions before they arise.
• Demonstrate proficiency in communicating with a globally diverse population across locales, roles, and functions; serve as a cross-cultural bridge between UK/EU market realities and US organizational priorities.
A day in the life
Your primary focus every single day is growth; for your team, for your advertisers, and for Amazon's video advertising and progammatic business in the UK. That means you start the morning with purpose: scanning your CRM dashboard and your team's pipeline health over coffee, picking up where a late-evening Slack from an IC in your team left a thread open on a major negotiation, and jumping into a quick pulse-check ahead of a CMO / briefing they're leading at 9am.
By mid-morning you're in the room yourself — a C-suite roundtable with a top-five UK advertiser. This isn't a pitch, it's a strategic dialogue. You're exploring how their shifting media mix, the fragmentation of linear TV, and a growing cord-cutting audience in 18-34s creates a genuine structural case for committing meaningful investment to streaming for the next 18 months. You ask sharp questions, read the room, and leave with a clear mandate for your team to support the sales teams in the development of proposals tailored to their objectives and strategy.
After lunch, you're in a cross-functional working session with colleagues from GTM, Agency Development, and Product. The agenda: aligning the UK go-to-market narrative for a new Live Sports sponsorship package. You bring the advertiser perspective with clarity; what the holding companies are saying, where the buying group hesitations are, and what needs to be in the package to clear the threshold for upfront commitment. Your input shapes the final commercial construct before it goes to market.
Mid-afternoon is blocked for the work that goes beyond regular commercial responsibilities. You're reviewing the first draft of a best practice document you're leading as part of a cross-locale SME project - synthesizing learnings from the EU5 that will raise the floor for video sales execution across the region. This is the kind of force-multiplication work that senior stakeholders notice: building something that lives on and scales beyond you.
Later in the day, you're deep in a coaching session with a Senior Specialist on your team who's preparing for their first independent VP-level meeting. You walk through the narrative structure, work through the likely objections, and help them think about how to position Amazon's measurement story in a way that resonates with a brand safety-conscious CFO or Head of Effectiveness. Developing your team is how you multiply your own impact across every account in the portfolio.
As the day winds down, you take 20 minutes to draft your contribution to the UK section of the monthly business review (MBR). You pull the right numbers from the forecast, frame the key risks and opportunities with the precision and honesty Amazon's senior leadership expects, and flag one structural commercial question you're bringing to the team next week. You wrap with a few lines of async feedback on a account or bridge the gap plan.
About the team
Amazon Ads is dedicated to driving measurable outcomes for both brands and agencies through advertising. Our ad solutions — including sponsored content, premium video, audio and custom ads — leverage Amazon’s innovations and insights to find, attract, and engage meaningfully with audiences.
We're all about helping brands reach the right audiences in the right places, without causing disruption. Our robust insights, expansive portfolio of properties, and comprehensive advertising solutions help advertisers interact and form relationships with customers – and give them a purposeful presence in customer’s lives.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS- Experience in marketing, brand advertising, media sales, or online advertising and close work with senior advertisers and agency stakeholders
- Experience building, executing and scaling cross-functional marketing programs
- Substantial B2B sales experience, with a significant portion in video media and programmatic sales, prioritising client-direct relationships, with deep understanding of the Agency ecosystem;
- Demonstrated experience managing and developing high-performing sales teams, including hiring, performance management, and talent retention;
- Deep, current expertise in selling both linear and digital video advertising, including programmatic video, STV and OLV, and premium content sponsorships;
- Track record of delivering large-scale, complex, multi-stakeholder advertising partnerships with measurable long-term revenue impact;
- Demonstrated ability to navigate significant ambiguity independently: translating undefined business objectives (from CEO/CMO level) into concrete media strategies and commercially compelling proposals that lead to significant incremental growth;
- Ability to operate effectively across internal cross-functional teams including Product, Legal, Finance, Marketing, and Ad Policy to build and deliver best-in-class advertiser experiences;
- Proficiency in applying 1P and 3P measurement and attribution tools for streaming and digital video advertising
- Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to influence and advocate at VP-level internally and externally, and to produce high-quality strategic documents (2-pagers, 6-pagers, QBR narratives) in line with senior business writing standards
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS- Experience negotiating complex deals with customers and partners or equivalent
- Experience positioning and selling innovative solutions to new and existing customers and market segments
- Experience delivering results for large, cross-functional initiatives/projects
- Experience writing business strategy documents and plans
- Familiarity with Amazon Ads solutions portfolio, including Sponsored Ads, Display, Audio, Amazon DSP, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), and Brand Innovation Labs;
- Experience working directly and collaboratively with product teams to translate advertiser feedback and European market needs into product roadmap influence;
- Experience delivering innovative entertainment experiences, including live events, sponsorships, or brand integration at scale for large audiences;
- Experience building and deploying measurement frameworks, reporting solutions, and data-driven performance metrics for video advertising campaigns;
- Demonstrated experience with Upfront and annual commitment processes in the UK or European video advertising market, including the development of compelling long-form partnership narratives;
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