About the Team
Amazon's Devices & Services Trust CX Innovations team is building the future of responsible AI for consumer devices. We deliver privacy-first, accessible, and trustworthy AI experiences that millions of customers use daily across Amazon's device ecosystem—including Alexa, Echo, and other ambient computing products. Our mission is to ensure that as we push the boundaries of generative AI innovation, we maintain Amazon's high bar for customer trust, privacy, inclusion, and accessibility.
Role Overview
We are seeking an exceptional Software Development Manager to lead multiple engineering teams building the foundational systems and consumer-facing features that enable trustworthy AI experiences at scale. You will partner closely with Product, Design, Legal, Policy, and Research teams to drive the technical strategy and execution for privacy-preserving AI architectures, responsible AI frameworks, and accessibility features that set the standard for consumer AI products. This is a high-impact leadership role where you'll build and scale engineering teams tackling complex technical challenges at the intersection of AI innovation and customer trust—balancing performance with privacy, building explainable AI systems, and creating guardrails that protect customers while enabling delightful experiences. You will be responsible for establishing technical standards, driving architectural decisions, and developing engineering leaders who can navigate the evolving landscape of AI safety and privacy.
What You'll Lead
Privacy-Preserving AI Systems:
- Drive the technical strategy for federated learning, differential privacy, and on-device AI architectures that protect customer data while delivering exceptional experiences
- Lead teams building privacy-preserving data pipelines that minimize data collection while maintaining model quality
- Establish consent management frameworks and data minimization systems that give customers meaningful control
- Architect the balance between on-device and cloud processing to optimize for both privacy and performance at scale
Responsible AI Infrastructure:
- Build and scale teams developing AI evaluation frameworks to measure model quality, safety, and bias across diverse customer populations
- Drive the implementation of guardrails and safety boundaries for LLMs and foundation models in consumer applications
- Establish observability and monitoring systems for AI performance, hallucination detection, and trust metrics
- Create governance frameworks that enable rapid innovation while maintaining Amazon's trust standards
Accessible & Inclusive AI Experiences:
- Lead engineering efforts to implement WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508 compliance across AI-powered interfaces for voice, visual, and multimodal experiences
- Build teams that design accessible AI features working seamlessly for customers with diverse abilities
- Establish inclusive design principles and engineering practices that ensure equitable AI performance across different demographics
Consumer-Facing Trust Features:
- Drive the development of explainable AI interfaces that help customers understand how AI makes decisions
- Lead teams building transparency controls showing customers what data is used and how
- Establish privacy dashboards and settings that give customers meaningful control over their AI experiences
- Architect cross-device identity management with privacy-first design principles
Key Technical Challenges You'll Solve
- Latency vs. Privacy Trade-offs: Optimize time-to-first-token and response times while maintaining strong privacy guarantees through on-device processing and selective cloud offloading
- AI Safety at Scale: Reduce hallucinations to <1% while maintaining 95%+ accuracy across diverse customer queries and contexts
- Ambient Computing Privacy: Build privacy controls for always-on environments that balance proactive assistance with clear boundaries
- Multimodal AI Systems: Architect distributed systems that handle text, voice, and visual inputs while preserving privacy across modalities
- Real-time Evaluation: Create low-latency evaluation systems that assess model outputs for safety, accuracy, and bias before reaching customers
What Makes You Successful
Customer Trust Obsession: You deeply understand that trust is earned through consistent, transparent, and privacy-respecting experiences. You make technical and organizational decisions that prioritize customer trust even when it means additional complexity or slower time-to-market.
Technical Leadership: You have strong computer science fundamentals and can dive deep into complex architectural decisions. You establish technical standards and best practices that enable your teams to move fast without breaking things. You're respected as a technical authority who can guide teams through ambiguous problem spaces.
Strategic Vision: You think at platform level, building reusable trust components that can be leveraged across Amazon's device portfolio. You develop multi-year technical roadmaps that balance innovation with sustainability and maintainability.
People Development: You're passionate about growing engineering leaders who understand both AI innovation and trust requirements. You create environments where engineers can do their best work and develop skills in emerging AI safety and privacy technologies.
Cross-Functional Influence: You partner effectively with product managers, UX designers, data scientists, legal teams, and policy experts. You can explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and influence architectural decisions across organizations. You navigate complex stakeholder environments and communicate effectively with executives.
Bias for Action with Governance: You thrive in ambiguous environments where you need to make pragmatic trade-offs between innovation and safety. You establish processes that enable rapid innovation while maintaining trust standards. You ship iteratively and learn from customer feedback.
Inclusive Leadership: You champion diverse perspectives and ensure your teams design systems that work for all customers, considering diverse abilities, contexts, and use cases from the start rather than as an afterthought.
Risk Management: You excel at evaluating privacy and trust implications of new AI capabilities. You balance innovation with safety concerns in high-stakes consumer products, making informed decisions about acceptable risk levels.
Organizational Scope & Impact
- Team Scale: Lead 20+ engineers across multiple teams focused on different trust domains (privacy, accessibility, AI safety, transparency)
- Cross-Functional Coordination: Partner with PMTs, TPMs, Legal, Policy, Research, Design, and Data Science teams across Amazon's device ecosystem
- Strategic Planning: Develop multi-year technical strategies for trust in ambient computing that impact millions of customers
- Organizational Influence: Drive adoption of trust standards across Amazon's device businesses, positioning Amazon as a leader in responsible AI for consumer devices
- Technical Debt Management: Balance innovation with sustainable, maintainable systems that can evolve with changing regulations and customer expectations
Why Join Us
- Lead engineering teams working on generative AI technology that impacts millions of customers daily
- Shape the future of responsible AI and set industry standards for privacy and trust
- Build and develop world-class engineering teams solving novel technical challenges
- Partner with exceptional product, design, research, and policy teams
- Solve complex problems at the intersection of AI innovation and customer protection
- Create systems that make AI accessible and trustworthy for everyone
- Work in a high-visibility role with significant impact on Amazon's device strategy
Basic Qualifications
- 3+ years of engineering team management experience
- 7+ years of engineering experience
- 8+ years of leading the definition and development of multi tier web services experience
- 3+ years of Software Engineer, Software Developer, or related occupational experience
- 1+ years of providing technical leadership and project management for all aspects of the software development lifecycle experience
- 1+ years of developing large-scale, multi-tiered distributed software systems using Java, C#, or C++ experience
- 1+ years of developing large-scale, multi-tiered distributed software systems using service-oriented architecture experience
- 1+ years of developing large-scale, multi-tiered distributed software systems using distributed programming experience
- Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
- Knowledge of engineering practices and patterns for the full software/hardware/networks development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, certification, and livesite operations
- Experience partnering with product or program management teams
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and senior leadership to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical designs, and product strategy
- Experience in recruiting, hiring, mentoring/coaching and managing teams of Software Engineers to improve their skills, and make them more effective, product software engineers
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, CA, Sunnyvale - 212,700.00 - 287,700.00 USD annually USA, WA, Bellevue - 184,900.00 - 250,200.00 USD annually USA, WA, Seattle - 184,900.00 - 250,200.00 USD annually