Sr Software Development Engineer, Amazon Q

Amazon Inc.; East Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 193,000 - 262,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon Q is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer in East Palo Alto, CA to help shape the next generation of AI-powered capabilities on AWS. You will design distributed systems, ground foundation models with retrieval and tools, and own end-to-end architecture from concept to production.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with product managers and applied scientists, and drive high standards for reliability, scalability, and security while delivering impactful customer experiences

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 of new and existing systems.
• Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team.

Responsibilities

• Build: Design and deliver major Amazon Q capabilities and the highly available, scalable, secure, and low-latency distributed systems that power them.
• Solve: Tackle ambiguous engineering problems unique to production generative AI, including grounding, orchestration, tool execution, retrieval, security, latency, reliability, and evaluation.
• Own: Lead projects end to end—from requirements and architecture through implementation, launch, operations, measurement and improvement.
• Lead: Define technical direction, influence architecture, and raise engineering standards across design, testing, observability, deployment and operations.
• Mentor: Raise the technical bar through reviews, discussions, and hands‑on development; guide teams through complex decisions.
• Innovate: Bring advances in foundation models, retrieval, reasoning, and agents into production.

Skills

Software development

Programming languages

System design / architecture

Mentor / Tech lead

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

Job description

Sr Software Development Engineer, Amazon Q

Job ID: 10563982 | Amazon Development Center U.S., Inc.

Amazon Q is helping redefine how developers and cloud practitioners build, operate, troubleshoot, and optimize on AWS. We are building an intelligent assistant that goes beyond answering questions—combining generative AI with deep AWS context, retrieval, tools, and actions to help customers understand their environments and get work done faster.

Building this experience introduces a new class of engineering challenges. How do you ground an LLM's response in relevant, up-to‑date information from a customer's AWS environment while maintaining strong security boundaries and low latency? How do you orchestrate multi-step agentic workflows that can reason, retrieve information, invoke tools, and take actions reliably and safely? How do you evaluate AI systems where quality cannot be measured by traditional software testing alone? These are the kinds of problems you will help solve.

We are looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer to help shape the next generation of Amazon Q. 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. You will work closely with engineers, product managers, applied scientists, UX partners, and teams across AWS to define architecture, make critical technical decisions, and translate advances in foundation models, retrieval, reasoning, and agents into secure, reliable production experiences.

This role offers an opportunity to influence both what we build and how we build it—developing new architectures and engineering mechanisms for AI‑powered systems while raising the technical bar across the team.

Key job responsibilities

• Build: Design and deliver major Amazon Q capabilities and the highly available, scalable, secure, and low-latency distributed systems that power them. Build systems that 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. Drive high engineering standards across design, testing, observability, deployment, and operational excellence.
• Mentor: Raise the technical bar of the organization through design reviews, code reviews, technical discussions, and hands‑on development. Mentor engineers and help teams navigate complex architectural and implementation decisions.
• Innovate: Work with applied scientists, product leaders, and engineering teams to bring advances in foundation models, retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI into production. Explore new architectures and mechanisms that improve the quality, safety, reliability, latency, and usefulness of AI‑powered customer experiences.

A day in the life

You’ll start the day with the signals from how Amazon Q performed yesterday — satisfaction trends, latency tails, eval results — and pick up the problem that matters most. Mornings might be a design review with applied scientists on retrieval or agent orchestration; afternoons, writing the service code that ships it. You’ll partner with PMs, TPMs, and AWS service teams onboarding their own capabilities into the assistant, and you’ll own what you build in production. Expect to move between deep distributed‑systems work, prompt and evaluation iteration, and A/B experiments that tell you whether your change actually helped a customer.

About the team

We’re the team behind Amazon Q in the AWS Management Console — engineers, applied scientists, and product managers working in one loop rather than in handoffs. Our mission is simple to say and hard to do: make the assistant genuinely useful to anyone operating on AWS. We ship fast, measure honestly, and say so when the data doesn't support the idea we liked. Because the field moves monthly, we expect to rewrite our own assumptions often, and we'd rather learn from a real experiment than argue in a doc. We care about operational excellence, and about each other’s time.

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

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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.

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

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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.

USA, CA, East Palo Alto - 193,300.00 - 261,500.00 USD annually