Key Points:
- Amazon will strip traditional job titles from hundreds of employees at its Ring and Blink home security units.
- The company will rename these white-collar product workers “builders” and their bosses “builder leaders.”
- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is leading a broader effort to reduce corporate bureaucracy and cut red tape.
- Employees worry the title changes will make earning promotions and pay raises much more difficult.
Hundreds of Amazon employees will soon lose their hard-won corporate job titles. The massive tech company is currently executing its annual review season, but this year comes with a strange twist. The company is not stripping titles to punish lazy or underperforming workers. Instead, Amazon is running a brand new corporate experiment. The tech giant is completely tossing out traditional job titles for white-collar workers who manage product development at its Ring and Blink home security units.
Starting next month, these highly paid professionals will lose their fancy titles. Instead, Amazon will simply call them “builders.” Their direct bosses will take on the slightly awkward title of “builder leaders.” This specific division of the company builds and manages the highly popular internet-connected security cameras and video doorbells used for home monitoring.
Jason Mitura, the man directly overseeing this massive switch, laid out his specific rationale in a recent internal memo. Mitura, who currently holds the traditional title of chief product officer, wrote the email earlier this month. Reuters journalists viewed the leaked memo, and Amazon officially confirmed its authenticity.
In the memo, Mitura stated that the company remains totally committed to dividing an organization of the future. He believes that achieving this goal requires the company to remain transparent and completely open to radical change. He explicitly told his staff that they are officially moving to one single job family called the Builder. Under this new structure, Mitura explained that the company will define and reward individual success through one simple question: exactly what is the scope and magnitude of the real customer value you actually create?
This strange new naming convention is actually part of a much larger trend. The term “builder” recently became a popular catch-all phrase across Silicon Valley. Tech companies now use the word to describe highly skilled workers who can single-handedly solve complex technical challenges, usually by utilizing new artificial intelligence tools. In the past, solving those same problems required massive teams of expensive software engineers and dedicated project managers.
Other tech giants are adopting similar language to flatten their corporate hierarchies. Meta, the massive company behind Facebook, recently started testing its own version of the idea. Reuters reported earlier this month that Meta began assigning the specific title of “AI builder” to certain highly technical job functions. Meanwhile, the massive payments firm Block recently started calling some of its middle managers “player-coaches” to emphasize a more hands-on leadership style.
At Amazon, this title experiment ties directly into a much broader corporate mission. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently embarked on a massive company-wide project to drastically reduce heavy corporate bureaucracy. Jassy even established a special internal hotline so employees can call out excessive red tape that is holding up their daily work. Mitura explained in his memo that the new title change means absolutely anyone can propose a change to the corporate structure. He also promised his team that if the new processes fail to work smoothly, the company will quickly roll them back.
Despite management’s optimistic tone, the actual workers feel incredibly nervous. Many employees fought hard for years to earn prestigious titles like “senior” and “lead.” With the sudden elimination of these hard-won titles, workers inside the unit told reporters they are deeply concerned about their financial futures. They worry that the clear path toward earning future promotions and securing decent pay raises will suddenly become much more difficult to navigate. Amazon currently relies on strict corporate pay bands and awards lucrative equity grants that are heavily tied to official employee levels and job titles.
Other Amazon employees, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs, expressed a much larger fear. They worry that if this small test works inside the Ring and Blink units, executives might decide to roll out the confusing title changes company-wide, affecting hundreds of thousands of workers.
An official Amazon spokesperson quickly pushed back against the growing panic. She explicitly stated that the workers’ fears are completely unfounded. She promised that base compensation, future career growth, and standard promotion paths will remain completely unchanged under the new system. The spokesperson argued that the simplified title change will help foster a new culture of corporate experimentation, ultimately enabling teams to deliver better products for their customers much more efficiently.
This is not the first time Amazon has experimented with a strange corporate structure. Back in 2009, Amazon purchased the online shoe retailer Zappos for nearly $1 billion. For several years, Zappos tried desperately to eliminate its own traditional hierarchical management structure as part of a bizarre business system it called “holacracy.” However, the confusing effort completely failed, and Zappos abandoned the system several years ago.
For now, the new builder experiment will move forward at Ring and Blink. In a show of solidarity, Mitura himself will also see his fancy executive job title change next month. The spokesperson suggested he might eventually become a “builder lead.”
