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
As a Senior Software Development Engineer on the Amazon Q team, you will:
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.
A day in the life
We’re on the lookout for the curious, those who think big and want to define the world of tomorrow. At Amazon, you will grow into the high impact person you know you’re ready to be. Every day will be filled with exciting new challenges, developing new skills, and achieving personal growth. How often can you say that your work changes the world? At Amazon, you’ll say it often. Join us and define tomorrow.
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
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.
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.
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, VA, Arlington - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually