Software Development Engineer, Alexa Audio, Alexa Audio

As Alexa Audio, we own the audio experiences on Alexa enabled devices. These experiences include Music, Podcast, Audio Books, Radio, and Ambient soundscapes. Our integration skill kits enable seamless integration of 1P / 3P audio content providers (e.g., Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple etc.) with Alexa devices. Audio is one of the most widely used experiences on Alexa, and is enjoyed by millions of customers on a daily basis.

There is a universe of tens of millions of distinct audio content that is available across streaming services. Using your voice, and timely proactive suggestions are the easiest ways to get to what you want. Alexa makes this magical for customers: ask any Alexa-enabled device to play your favorite song, podcast, book or a radio station, and Alexa will find the right content for you and play it. We also support being able to control and manage playback across multiple devices, and movement of media playback across them. It is still Day 1 for the audio experiences, and we're looking for a leader to help us make it even better.

On the Alexa Entertainment Team, you will have an enormous opportunity to impact the customer experience, design, architecture, and implementation of state of the art products that will be used every day by people you know. No matter what the role, we’re looking for people who are passionate about innovating on behalf of customers, demonstrate a high degree of product ownership, and want to have fun while they make history.

In this role you’ll have independent technical ownership on new customer features and supporting architecture on a day to day and week to week basis. You’ll learn new in-demand skills like building voice control interfaces and scalable API platforms interfacing with Generative AI that will be highly valuable as you grow your career at Amazon and beyond. You’ll work directly with Product Management and Design to refine the customer experience for Alexa entertainment featured products. You’ll join a unique team in the Alexa organization with our own culture – we move fast to deliver new great features for customers and have a ton of fun doing it.

Come join us as we build the Voice OS for Entertainment in the home using innovative technologies. We’re breaking new ground and need your help to bring our vision to reality.

Key job responsibilities
A person in this role is expected to :-
1. Design, implement, and deliver software in ambiguous and complex problem spaces of Alexa Audio working with partners such as product managers, technical program managers, and senior/principal engineers to deliver on the business goals related to Audio Experience.

2. Create infrastructure to bring the power of LLMs into the Audio space while championing best practices for software engineering and operational excellence.

3. Create tools and software to evaluate, analyze, and improve the model accuracy for various Audio experiences, while reducing latency and customer friction.

4. Influence the operational and engineering excellence roadmap across core audio services set by the lead SDEs to proactively address peak readiness, hardware efficiency, scaling, throttling and improve availability & resiliency for Alexa Audio Services.

5. Provide valuable design feedback around latency considerations, two-way door decisions and valuable coding feedback around coding standards, quality, versioning to both internal and external away teams, guide them on best practices for developing within Audio owned services and push back on proposals which do not adhere to our high quality standards.

6. Mentor junior members of the team and help them onboard. They participate in interviews and hiring efforts for the team, and constantly share knowledge of components they own and have expert knowledge of through mediums such as demos, lunch-n-learns, and org-wide emails.

7. Leadership principles that are most important for this role are ownership, deliver results, deep dive, bias for action, hire & develop the best, and earns trust.


A day in the life
We collaborate across disciplines. You will have the opportunity to work closely with product managers, UX designers and researchers, and business intelligence engineers to innovate, measure, analyze and refine the experiences we deliver to millions of customers across the planet on a daily basis. Our roles are all well defined, but we encourage individuals to cross boundaries and learn from each other.

About the team
As Alexa Audio, we own the audio experiences on Alexa enabled devices. These experiences include Music, Podcast, Audio Books, Radio, and Ambient soundscapes. Our integration skill kits enable seamless integration of 1P / 3P audio content providers (e.g., Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple etc.) with Alexa devices. Audio is one of the most widely used experiences on Alexa, and is enjoyed by millions of customers on a daily basis.

There is a universe of tens of millions of distinct audio content that is available across streaming services. Using your voice, and timely proactive suggestions are the easiest ways to get to what you want. Alexa makes this magical for customers: ask any Alexa-enabled device to play your favorite song, podcast, book or a station, and Alexa will find the right content for you and play it. We also support being able to control and manage playback across multiple devices, and movement of media playback across them. It is still Day 1 for the audio experiences, and we're looking for a leader to help us make it even better.

Basic Qualifications

- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience programming with at least one software programming language

Preferred Qualifications

- 3+ 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

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