Using your benefits today means portals, phone calls, hold music, and fine print. We are changing that by bringing AI in as a strategic partner: software that understands what a person needs and helps them find the answer at the moment of need. This posting is for the tech lead on one of our two biggest product bets, driving large, ambiguous problems that span multiple organizations. This is a generative-AI and agentic-engineering role first, at very large scale. You will join Benefits Engagement Technology and Services (BETS), the Amazon organization reinventing how more than a million employees and their families engage with their benefits. Our vision is benefits that are AI-powered, personalized, and proactive, where timely guidance reaches people when they need it rather than making them hunt for it. BETS builds and operates the platform that delivers benefits experiences across mobile, web, and an AI assistant, from self-service content creation to multi-channel campaigns to analytics, and we are now building a family of AI-native products on top of it. Two of those products are our biggest bets, and we are building each as a focused product team inside BETS:
- A reimagined health plan where AI is a strategic partner for members instead of a portal to navigate. Rather than directories, phone trees, and hold music, it understands what someone needs and brings the right answer to them at the moment of need: the in-network doctor, the real out-of-pocket cost before they book, the claim explained in plain language, and the next step taken on their behalf. It is built on secure, HIPAA-compliant foundations to serve very large member populations, with a path to serve other organizations over time.
- An agentic workforce for benefits operations that makes running benefits for a workforce of millions dramatically easier. Managing dozens of programs, vendors, and budgets is enormous operational work; AI agents take on that heavy lifting, surfacing what needs attention, preparing the analysis and the recommended action, and handling the routine, so the people who manage benefits spend their time on decisions and strategy instead of manual operations. The system learns from every decision and keeps that knowledge with the team. You will be the tech lead on one of these two products. Here is what sets this organization apart: we do not just build AI products, we build them the AI Native way, and we have already proven it. A small pod rebuilt a major benefits platform and shipped it to production in 3 months, work originally scoped at 12, by restructuring how we engineer around agents. In our model, humans own judgment and agents own the mechanical middle. Engineers write the specification and set the acceptance criteria; agents (Claude Code, Kiro) write a growing share of the implementation, author tests, and resolve code-review comments; engineers direct, validate, and own what ships, and still hand-write the novel, ambiguous, and infrastructure-heavy work where models fall short. Recursive self-improvement, where the system proposes its own next version and a human approves, is the north star we are deliberately climbing toward, one validated step at a time, with humans at the judgment gates. As a Senior Software Development Engineer in BETS, you are the tech lead for your team’s product. You lead the software development of a system of many features across its full lifecycle, working shoulder to shoulder with peers on related teams, on problems where the customer direction is clear but the technology strategy is not and the constraints conflict and span multiple organizations. You own the team-level architecture and provide the system-wide view and design guidance, making the high-stakes, hard-to-reverse decisions and reviewing others’ work, human-authored and agent-authored alike, so it fits the bigger picture and is extensible, performant, and secure. You stay hands-on in the code and code reviews that matter most. You lead the team’s adoption and evolution of the AI Native build loops (the specs, acceptance criteria, and simulation coverage that let agents safely take on more of the work, plus the scoped authorization and guardrails that travel with that autonomy) and shape the agentic foundations the team builds on, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and MCP. You drive operational excellence for a regulated, large-scale service, resolve root causes even when the fix crosses team boundaries, and are sought out by partner teams (identity, privacy, security, legal, and vendors) for your expertise. Above all, you grow the engineers around you: you lead through influence and constructive debate, coach and mentor multiple engineers, and set a quality bar the team emulates. The strongest technical leaders here work backwards from the customer and bring a strong product design sense, not just technical elegance, to every decision. How we work, honestly: teams here are small, which means high ownership density and architectural decisions you will actually own rather than inherit fully formed. Some of our work carries hard, externally committed launch dates, so this role carries real deadline pressure. Because we handle sensitive personal data, privacy and security are designed in from the start and are everyone’s responsibility, not an afterthought. You own what you build, including its operations and on-call. In return you build rare, portable depth: regulated, large-scale platforms, production agentic systems, and the judgment to direct them. This role is for tech leads who think like owners. If you want to prove that a small, senior team can enter a hard domain and win, if you want to design the systems that build systems, and if you are drawn to decisions that will still matter across the next several product generations, this is a rare seat.
Key job responsibilities
- Lead your team’s software development end to end: own the team-level architecture, provide the system-wide view and design guidance, make the high-stakes one-way-door decisions, and deliver a system of many features across its full lifecycle.
- Be the tech lead on large, ambiguous problems that span multiple organizations, where the customer direction is clear but the technology strategy is not; drive clarity and align partner teams (identity, privacy, security, legal, and vendors) on the path forward.
- Lead and mentor engineers: coach multiple engineers on and off your team, help grow the team through recruiting and career guidance, and drive adoption of engineering best practices that others emulate.
- Work backwards from the customer, bringing product design judgment to technical decisions, not just technical elegance.
- Lead the team’s AI Native build loops: define the specs, acceptance criteria, and simulation coverage that let agents safely take on more of the work, and shape the agentic foundations the team builds on (Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, MCP).
- Stay a hands-on practitioner: contribute to the code and code reviews that most affect the product, and hold human-authored and agent-authored work to the same high bar.
- Drive operational excellence and resolve root causes across boundaries: ensure strong alarms, telemetry, runbooks, and retrospectives, and eliminate endemic problems even when the fix requires influencing other teams.
Basic Qualifications
- 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
Preferred Qualifications
- 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