Sr. SDE, Alexa For Shopping

What if you could talk to your Amazon Store? With Alexa+ on Echo Show, customers can now do exactly that. The full Amazon store is live on Echo Show 15 and 21 — a new way to shop at home that combines voice as a natural way to express needs with the product details, reviews, and videos customers rely on to make confident decisions.

This product started with an ambitious question and was built from scratch — no prior version to iterate on, no existing architecture to extend, no playbook to follow. The team pioneered novel challenges including rendering the full, always-current Amazon store natively on Echo Show in real time, building visual grounding from scratch so Alexa's responses stay anchored to what the customer sees on screen, and creating a conversational commerce paradigm that lets customers skip screens entirely with natural language.

We are seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer to help lead the next chapter of this experience — scaling what we've built, expanding to new surfaces and marketplaces, and pushing the boundaries of agentic, multimodal shopping. As a senior engineer on this team, you will own the architecture of major components, set technical direction through ambiguity, and raise the bar for the engineers around you.

This is greenfield, 0→1 work at the intersection of Generative AI, multimodal experiences, and conversational commerce. You will have the freedom to experiment, invent, and make the hard architectural calls on behalf of our customers, and you'll work for a strong leadership team that optimizes for your growth.

Key job responsibilities
As a Senior Software Development Engineer on this team, you will:

- Own the design and architecture of major systems that scale and extend the Amazon Store experience on Echo Show and Fire devices, making the foundational technical decisions the team builds on.

- Drive technical direction through ambiguity — decomposing hard, unprecedented problems into tractable designs and aligning multiple engineers around them.

- Set and uphold the engineering and operational excellence bar: design reviews, coding standards, testing strategy, and livesite/operational readiness.

- Lead the work to keep the store rendering in real time and in sync, sharpen visual grounding, and make conversational, multimodal shopping flows feel effortless.

- Drive expansion to new surfaces and international marketplaces, anticipating scaling and reliability challenges before they become blockers.

- Act as a technical leader and mentor — growing SDE I/II engineers, elevating code and design quality, and multiplying the team's impact.

- Partner deeply with engineering, science, product, and design leaders across Alexa Shopping, including partners in Seattle across time zones, to influence direction beyond your immediate team.

A day in the life
No two days look exactly alike, but here's the shape of it. You'll spend focused time on the hardest design problems — how the store renders in real time, how visual grounding stays anchored, how a new marketplace comes online — and just as much time in design reviews, unblocking teammates, and mentoring the engineers you're growing. Because this is 0→1 work, you'll often be making architectural calls without a playbook, and setting the direction others build on.

Days blend deep technical work with technical leadership: leading a design discussion, reviewing a tricky change, aligning with senior engineers on a partner team, and helping leadership see around the next corner. You'll partner closely with engineering, science, product, and design colleagues across Alexa Shopping, many of them in Seattle, so some collaboration spans time zones.

Your internal stakeholders are the product, design, and partner engineering teams shaping the Alexa+ shopping experience; your end customers are shoppers at home talking to their Echo Show, expecting it to just work. The problems you'll own range from "how do we keep the store always in sync and fast on-device at scale?" to "how do we make conversational shopping feel effortless across marketplaces?" — foundational, customer-facing problems where your architectural decisions land in people's living rooms.

About the team
We're the team that taught the Amazon Store to talk back. We took an idea that didn't have a blueprint and shipped it to customers' living rooms — and now we're just getting to the fun part: making it bigger, faster, and available to shoppers around the world.

Our mission is simple to say and hard to do: make shopping on Alexa feel effortless and delightful, no matter where a customer is or which device they reach for. We sit right where voice, vision, and Generative AI meet retail at Amazon scale — which means the problems we solve genuinely haven't been solved before, and the person who cracks them is often the one willing to sit with the hardest problem the longest.

Culture-wise, we're builders who like ambiguity and dislike bureaucracy. We ship, we learn, we tell stories over chai, and we celebrate the wins (and the instructive failures). We hire smart people and give them room to run — you'll own real problems from day one, and as a senior engineer you'll help set the technical direction and grow the people around you. We take the work seriously and ourselves a little less so. If you like the idea of building something customers can literally talk to, you'll fit right in.

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
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

Preferred Qualifications

- 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience

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