Senior AI Systems Engineer, Gen AI & AWS Platform

Amazon Web Services (AWS); Arlington (VA); On-site; USD 168,000 - 227,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon Q, an AWS initiative, seeks a Senior Software Development Engineer to shape the next generation of its AI-powered assistant. You will work at the intersection of generative AI, agentic systems, and large-scale distributed services to build highly visible, customer-facing capabilities used across AWS.

As a Senior SDE, you will provide technical leadership for complex and ambiguous initiatives, collaborating with engineers, product managers, applied scientists, and UX partners to define

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
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

Responsibilities

• Build: Design and deliver major Amazon Q capabilities and the highly available, scalable, secure, and low-latency distributed systems that power them.
• Connect foundation models with customer context, AWS knowledge, retrieval systems, APIs, tools, and actions.
• Solve: Tackle ambiguous engineering problems unique to production generative AI, including contextual grounding, agent orchestration, tool execution, retrieval, security boundaries, latency, reliability, and mechanisms for evaluating AI quality and effectiveness.
• Own: Lead projects end to end—from requirements and architecture through implementation, launch, operations, measurement, and continuous improvement—making thoughtful trade-offs across customer experience, quality, scalability, availability, security, performance, and cost.
• Lead: Define technical direction for complex initiatives, influence architecture across Amazon Q and partner teams, and simplify systems as they evolve.
• Mentor: Raise the technical bar of the organization through design reviews, code reviews, technical discussions, and hands-on development.
• Innovate: Work with applied scientists, product leaders, and engineering teams to bring advances in foundation models, retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI into production.

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

Job description

Amazon Q, an AWS initiative, seeks a Senior Software Development Engineer to shape the next generation of its AI-powered assistant. You will work at the intersection of generative AI, agentic systems, and large-scale distributed services to build highly visible, customer-facing capabilities used across AWS.

As a Senior SDE, you will provide technical leadership for complex and ambiguous initiatives, collaborating with engineers, product managers, applied scientists, and UX partners to define