Sr. Software Development Engineer, Alexa Audio

- 7+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 7+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 7+ 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
- 7+ 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
- Experience taking a leading role in building complex software systems that have been successfully delivered
- Ability to take a project from scoping requirements through actual launch of the project
- Knowledge of professional software engineering practices & best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
- Demonstrated ability to mentor other software developers to maintain architectural vision and software quality

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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.

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. The base pay for this position ranges from $151,300/year in our lowest geographic market up to $261,500/year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on a number of factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, please visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits. This position will remain posted until filled. Applicants should apply via our internal or external career site.
About the Role
At Amazon's Alexa Audio Playback Experience team, we're seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer to lead innovation in our multimodal audio experiences. There is a universe of tens of millions of distinct audio content available across streaming services. Using your voice and timely proactive suggestions are the easiest ways to get to what you want. Alexa makes this magical for customers: ask any Alexa-enabled device to play your favorite song, podcast, book or station, and Alexa will find the right content for you and play it. We also support being able to control and manage playback across multiple devices, and movement of media playback across them. It is still Day 1 for the audio experiences, and we're looking for a leader to help us make it even better.
What You'll Do
You'll architect and develop conversational audio systems that understand natural language and complex queries like "play the song from the movie where pilots are playing volleyball." You'll create both reactive and proactive experiences that initiate audio content through routines, alarms, and timely suggestions. Working with tier 1 systems supporting millions of daily customer requests, you'll create lightning-fast spearfishing experiences that allow customers to quickly find exactly what they want through voice-forward and screen-based interfaces. You'll build experiences that work seamlessly across the full selection of Amazon devices (Echo, Fire TV, on-the-go and automotive) and 3P partners like Sonos and others. You'll design personalization systems that learn customer preferences and implement solutions leveraging both established machine learning approaches and generative AI technologies, working at the forefront of LLM technology with both Amazon Nova and Anthropic models.
What We're Looking For
We need a passionate engineer with extensive experience in distributed systems and voice-forward interaction design. You should have strong expertise in ML/AI technologies with a background in audio systems or content delivery. Experience building cross-device experiences that maintain consistency while optimizing for different form factors is essential. Your proven leadership of complex technical projects, familiarity with high-scale services, and excellent communication skills will be critical for success in this role.
Technical Skills That Will Set You Apart
Experience with conversation design, natural language understanding, and rapid content retrieval systems will distinguish top candidates. Knowledge of recommendation systems, content personalization algorithms, and cross-device development are crucial. Familiarity with building proactive systems, voice-forward and screen-based interfaces, and understanding of integrating with diverse partner ecosystems will be particularly valuable.
Why You'll Love It
You'll push the boundaries of voice-forward technology while creating features that millions use daily across a diverse ecosystem of devices. Your work will span AI and seamless cross-device experiences that make interaction with audio content more natural, personalized, and automated. Join a diverse team solving complex technical challenges in a rapidly growing space.
Our Team Culture
We embrace a culture of innovation where creativity and experimentation are celebrated. Our team values deep technical discussions but balances them with a collaborative, supportive environment where everyone has a voice. We conduct Voice of the Customer sessions where we listen to customer feedback and directly improve the quality and engagement of our experiences. Our hackathons have informed some of our most popular features.
We're passionate about audio experiences and many team members are musicians, DJs, authors, or audiobook enthusiasts themselves, with a multilingual team that brings diverse perspectives. We engage across roles with data scientists, business intelligence experts, natural language specialists, and quality professionals. This cross-functional collaboration and personal connection to our product drives our customer obsession and attention to detail. We operate with the agility of a startup while leveraging Amazon's scale and resources, giving you the opportunity to make meaningful impact from day one.
Join us as we continue to reinvent how people discover and enjoy audio content through the magic of Alexa!

Key job responsibilities
- Provide technical leadership to the team of engineers
- Lead development and maintenance of key system features
- Work with other team members to investigate design approaches, prototype new technology and evaluate technical feasibility.
- Work in an Agile/Scrum environment to deliver high quality software against strict timelines.

About the team
As Alexa Audio, we own the audio experiences on Alexa enabled devices. These experiences include Music, Podcast, Audio Books, Radio, and Ambient soundscapes. Our integration skill kits enable seamless integration of 1P / 3P audio content providers (e.g., Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple etc.) with Alexa devices. Audio is one of the most widely used experiences on Alexa, and is enjoyed by millions of customers on a daily basis.

There is a universe of tens of millions of distinct audio content that is available across streaming services. Using your voice, and timely proactive suggestions are the easiest ways to get to what you want. Alexa makes this magical for customers: ask any Alexa-enabled device to play your favorite song, podcast, book or a station, and Alexa will find the right content for you and play it. We also support being able to control and manage playback across multiple devices, and movement of media playback across them. It is still Day 1 for the audio experiences, and we're looking for a leader to help us make it even better.