He will probably be a principle or senior principle and will have a lot of freedom over what his group does, as long as he can justify that it helps the company in some way (which really shouldn't be any more difficult than justifying funding to ${government-organization}).
Freedom to control what your group works on versus resources (high quality staff, compute, etc.) to effectively pursue that work are very different things.
Fair enough. My experience didn't take me to AWS, but in retail it was a problem for entire tier 1 services to get resources with VP support, let alone new development/research initiatives.
Perhaps Amazon has changed, or AWS is simply different/better in this regard.
