Amazon tests ‘builder’ titles in Ring and Blink, unsettling workers

Amazon has begun testing a title overhaul inside Ring and Blink, telling hundreds of employees that the usual white-collar ranks will give way to a single job family: “Builder.” Managers would become “builder leads,” a change unfolding during annual review season and already raising questions about how workers will read promotions, status and pay progression inside two businesses built around connected cameras and doorbells.

The company says the shift is not a penalty for poor performance. Instead, it is an organizational test aimed at making the home-security units move faster and look more like the kind of lean product teams favored across Silicon Valley. Jason Mitura, who is overseeing the change, wrote in an internal memo that Amazon was building an “organization of the future.” Amazon has also said compensation, growth and promotion paths remain unchanged.

The stakes are larger than titles. Ring and Blink are not minor side projects. Amazon bought Ring in 2018 for about $1 billion and Blink for about $90 million, and both brands sell internet-connected devices for home monitoring. In businesses like those, where hardware, software and AI tools are increasingly intertwined, the language of the org chart can shape how quickly teams ship products and how clearly employees see their place in the company.

The move fits squarely into Andy Jassy’s broader campaign to make Amazon behave more like a startup despite its size. Jassy has told employees that Amazon wants to “operate like the world’s largest startup,” emphasizing speed, ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality. He has also said the company’s culture is not a “birthright” and called strengthening it a top priority. That message was reinforced in Amazon’s 2025 shareholder letter, published April 9, 2026, which framed the company around invention, long-term thinking and removing roadblocks to velocity.

Still, the experiment is unsettling some workers because titles do more than decorate business cards. Stripping out words like senior or lead can make career ladders feel less visible, even if the official pay structure does not change. Amazon’s bet is that flatter language will reduce bureaucracy and speed execution. The risk is that it also blurs rank inside a company where employees already know how aggressively management measures performance.

Amazon is hardly alone in testing this approach. Meta has been experimenting with “AI builder” as a title for some functions, and Block has used “player-coach” for some managers. Amazon-owned Zappos once went further, trying a no-titles, no-managers, no-hierarchy model called holacracy before abandoning it. That history suggests the appeal of flatter structures is easy to sell and hard to sustain. If Amazon keeps the builder language beyond Ring and Blink, it would signal that the company sees vocabulary itself as a management tool, not just a branding exercise.