Senior Software Development Engineer

- 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
- Experience with knowledge graphs, vector databases, or information retrieval systems
- Familiarity with LLM integration patterns, prompt engineering, or agentic AI frameworks
- 5+ 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

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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 - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually
We're looking for a technical leader to help architect a system that has never existed before — one that gives AI persistent, compounding memory at organizational scale. This is not an incremental improvement to an existing service. It's a new foundational capability that will fundamentally change how work gets done. You'll be one of the founding engineers on this team. The architecture decisions you make in the next six months will define the system for years.

Key job responsibilities
As a Senior Software Development Engineer, you will own the technical architecture for core system components and lead the team through novel engineering challenges at the intersection of distributed systems, knowledge retrieval, and AI. You'll partner directly with Applied Scientists and leadership to translate research into production. Specific responsibilities include:

1. Own the end-to-end architecture for knowledge extraction, real-time retrieval, and cross-domain reconciliation systems.
2. Lead design and implementation of distributed systems handling millions of events per day with sub-second retrieval latency.
3. Make foundational choices about storage, indexing, and retrieval that will scale from day-one prototype to company-wide production.
4. Define technical standards, code review practices, and engineering culture for a team that's forming now.
5. Partner directly with Applied Scientists to translate research breakthroughs into production-grade systems.
6. Drive technical strategy with senior leadership visibility — your decisions shape the product roadmap.
7. Design systems that handle temporal decay, conflicting knowledge sources, and privacy-preserving retrieval at scale.
8. Mentor junior engineers and establish the patterns that the rest of the team will build on.

About the team
We're a new team within Amazon's Personalization organization, which built the recommendation systems that serve hundreds of millions of customers. We're applying that same depth of expertise to a fundamentally new domain — one where the "customer" is every builder at Amazon, and the "product" is an AI that compounds its value with every interaction.

The team is small, the problems are hard, and the autonomy is real. We value builders who invent patterns rather than follow playbooks, and who are energized by owning the full stack from research prototype to production system.