Amazon's Personalization organization builds the AI systems behind how hundreds of millions of customers discover and shop. We extract and reason over customer signals in real time, power LLM-driven recommendation experiences, and build AI-native discovery surfaces that combine products, content, and contextual recommendations. Our work sits at the intersection of generative AI, large-scale distributed systems, and customer-facing products, delivered through high-performance web and mobile experiences at Amazon scale.
In this role you'll design and build features that shape how customers discover products - tailored to their preferences, helping them find exactly what they need, even before they know they need it. We're defining how LLMs integrate into real-time personalization, how noisy behavioral signals become durable customer understanding, and how AI-powered experiences ship reliably at scale. You'll work across multiple technical teams, ship iteratively, and see your work in the hands of customers quickly. This organization values experimentation, moves fast, and gives engineers real ownership over what they build.
We are looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer who leads through technical depth and sound judgment. Someone who owns team-level architecture, provides system-wide design guidance, and brings perspective on both current and future technology choices. You take on customer problems where the technological strategy is not yet defined, and you drive productive discussions to align teams on the best path forward. You don’t just deliver high-quality software yourself - you set the standard that others follow. You actively mentor multiple engineers, drive adoption of engineering best practices, and ensure your team has strong operational foundations. You make the team permanently stronger, not dependent on your presence. When the right solution isn’t technical - when it’s a process change, a culture shift, or a staffing decision - you recognize that and act accordingly.
Key job responsibilities
- Own team architecture of personalized recommendation system operating at Amazon scale
- Lead the design and delivery of cross-teams projects end-to-end, with focus on maintainability, scalability, performance, and reliability
- Collaborate with Product and Science to define technical roadmap and experiences based on data
- Build AI-powered experiences including personalized recommendations, relevance explanations, and knowledge-driven features using LLMs and generative AI
- Define and drive measurement strategies including analytics events and experiment configurations to track business and technical metrics
- Create clarity from ambiguity and make sound technical decisions in a problem space where established patterns don't apply
- Drive adoption of engineering best practices through exemplary personal coding practices
- Proactively simplify existing systems and resolve endemic, root-cause problems
About the team Our team is part of Amazon's Personalization organization, a high-performing group that leverages Amazon's expertise in machine learning, big data, distributed systems, and user experience design to deliver the best shopping experiences for our customers.
Our vision is to enhance customer shopping experience on Amazon by leveraging personalization techniques. We strive to save customers valuable time by tailoring their journey to their individual needs, interests, and preferences. Our goal involves identifying personalization opportunities to develop and optimize customer experiences, thereby improving the overall search and discovery process across Amazon.
Basic Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
- 10+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 3+ years of experience leading the design and architecture of large-scale distributed systems
- Experience owning and driving technical strategy and architecture decisions for a team or system
- Experience leading multi-engineer projects from design through delivery, including decomposing complex problems and coordinating across teams
- Experience with full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, deployment, and operations
- Experience mentoring and coaching other software engineers
Preferred Qualifications
- Master’s degree or equivalent
- Experience with experimentation platforms (A/B testing), analytics instrumentation, and metrics-driven iteration at large scale
- Experience with AI/ML system integration, model serving infrastructure, or generative AI applications in production
- Experience with end-to-end SDLC ownership including establishing operational excellence practices: monitoring/metrics, alarming, runbooks, incident response, and COE/retrospective processes
- Track record of simplifying complex systems, resolving systemic technical debt, and improving engineering processes
- Experience influencing technical decisions across organizational boundaries without direct authority
- Experience writing technical design documents that drive alignment across multiple teams and stakeholders
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.