Hundreds of millions of customers discover products on Amazon through personalized recommendations. Our team builds and operates the recommendation engine serving every marketplace, every surface, and every outbound channel at billions of requests per day. We're looking for a Software Development Engineer to help push it forward.
Our systems span real-time machine learning inference, AI-powered automated merchandising, content ranking, and large-scale personalization, all built for low-latency performance and resilience through the highest-traffic shopping events. You will work on meaningful problems at massive scale, collaborating with talented engineers and scientists to shape how customers discover products across Amazon. The team is entering a new phase, taking personalization to new marketplaces worldwide and moving to AI-driven merchandising automation. This role is central to delivering that shift.
Key job responsibilities
Design, implement, and operate features across distributed, latency-sensitive services, owning end-to-end delivery from design through production launch and operational readiness
Contribute to system design discussions and architectural decisions, balancing tradeoffs in scalability, maintainability, and performance while integrating machine learning models and content rankers into the serving layer
Write high-quality, peer-reviewed code and raise the engineering bar through code reviews, design feedback, and mentoring teammates on best practices
Expand platform capabilities to new marketplaces worldwide, building configurable tooling and self-service integrations for partner teams
Participate in on-call rotations, identify root causes of operational issues, and drive improvements that strengthen system resilience and reduce toil
A day in the life
You start the day reviewing results from experiments impacting hundreds of millions of shoppers. Your time splits between focused build work — shipping features, reviewing code, designing recommendation strategies with applied scientists — and cross-team collaboration with partner engineering teams, product managers, or marketing stakeholders integrating new content sources. You deploy to production frequently and validate with real-time dashboards. On-call weeks focus on operational health and system resilience.
About the team
We own the recommendation engine behind Amazon's merchandising personalization, serving every marketplace and channel. The team is growing and has engineers based in San Diego and Seattle, at a range of experience levels, focused on high-quality code, frequent experimentation, and continuous delivery. Our priorities include AI-powered campaign automation, worldwide expansion, and platform modernization. We ship often, review rigorously, and support each other's growth.
Basic qualifications
- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- 1+ years of software development engineer or related occupational experience
- 1+ years of designing and developing large-scale, multi-tiered, multi-threaded, embedded or distributed software applications, tools, systems, and services using: C#, C++, Java, or Perl experience
- 1+ years of Object Oriented Design experience
- Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
- Experience programming with at least one software programming language
Preferred qualifications
- 3+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit
https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.
The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
USA, WA, Seattle - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually
