My only experiences are as an SDE in retail in a group with little power and as a research intern in AWS in a group that is more influential. I don't think the difference in organizations is what does it so much as the difference in power; the researcher who started our group is very well-known in our domain and has a lot of say in how things work internally. Even things that I used to think were impossible to have any say over.
This professor's situation seems similar to me, so my best guess is that he'll have the same freedom (both in direction and in resources).
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}).
There's a trade-off here: You have to do things that have immediate value to the company (which, at Amazon, corresponds exactly to things that have value to your customers), but you pretty much have the power of the entire internet to do this (AWS). Not to mention more data than most researchers could ever dream of. It's not just monetary.
Since research at Amazon is new, I have no idea how well they're going to handle giving back to the community long-term. But I'm interning with a verification group there and the gist seems to be that if the group wants to give back and there's at least one person who's influential enough to get what they ask for, the group will give back.
I think it's actually problematic that research and industry concerns don't correspond more often. Yeah, it's not our job to be engineers and ship products, but it seems like there are important questions we ought to be answering as researchers that we consider industry ground, but that engineers don't actually have the background to solve. Some of these are totally arbitrary, chosen by the community, deemed "uninteresting" if you want to get published anywhere decent, even though there's plenty of interesting work left.
This professor's situation seems similar to me, so my best guess is that he'll have the same freedom (both in direction and in resources).