Senior AI-Powered Discovery & Search Systems Engineer

Amazon Inc.; Santa Monica (CA); On-site; USD 168,000 - 227,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

RSUs

Sign-on bonus

Job summary

Amazon Inc. in Santa Monica is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer to own architecture for IMDb's discovery platform, including search, ranking, and lists. You will influence system design across large-scale services and drive AI-powered enhancements leveraging IMDb's entity graph.

You will mentor engineers, set coding standards, and deliver end-to-end features on AWS OpenSearch Service, while balancing performance, reliability, and security in a highly scalable environment.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of non-internship professional software development experience.
• 6+ years of programming with at least one software programming language.
• 6+ 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.
• 6+ 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 building search, discovery, ranking, information retrieval systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with AWS OpenSearch Service, Elasticsearch, or similar search technologies, including index design, mappings, analyzers, query optimization, relevance tuning, sharding, and cluster performance.
• Experience with GraphQL, REST APIs, or similar API technologies, and building platform/self-service integration paths (typed SDKs, versioned contracts).

Responsibilities

• Lead the development and technical strategy of key system features for IMDb's search platform on AWS OpenSearch Service - index design, relevance tuning, query performance, and scaling.
• Own the architecture for a significant area of the discovery platform (search/retrieval, ranking, or the list platform), providing a system-wide view and design guidance across the team.
• Lead the design and delivery of complex, multi-engineer projects end to end - scoping, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations - breaking work into parallel streams and integrating it into a coherent whole.
• Build intelligent retrieval and ML-powered ranking, plus platform capabilities (API contracts, versioned SLOs, typed SDKs) for downstream and AI-agent consumers.
• Raise the operational bar: own alarms, telemetry, runbooks, and COE practices, balancing velocity against reliability on the critical path.
• Review designs and code across the team to ensure solutions are well-designed, extensible, performant, and secure; drive adoption of engineering best practices.
• Identify and resolve architecture deficiencies and systemic operational issues, including those where the platform bottlenecks other teams' innovation.
• Mentor engineers and partner with product and program management to shape the discovery roadmap.
• Contribute to AI-native platform practices - steering files, structured knowledge, and agent-readable interfaces for your codebases.

Skills

Software development

System design

Mentorship

Leadership

Engineering standards

Performance optimization

Retrieval/IR

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

Tools

AWS OpenSearch Service

Elasticsearch

GraphQL/REST APIs

Job description

Amazon Inc. in Santa Monica is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer to own architecture for IMDb's discovery platform, including search, ranking, and lists. You will influence system design across large-scale services and drive AI-powered enhancements leveraging IMDb's entity graph.

You will mentor engineers, set coding standards, and deliver end-to-end features on AWS OpenSearch Service, while balancing performance, reliability, and security in a highly scalable environment.