Software Development Engineer, Alexa Daily Essentials

Are you excited to work on a product used by millions of customers on a daily basis? Come and join the Alexa Daily Essentials team!

Alexa News, part of Alexa Daily Essentials, keeps customers informed about the world around them by seamlessly integrating the news they want most into their everyday lives. We deliver news experiences that are relevant and personalized — surfacing the stories that matter most to each individual customer, at the right moment, on the right device. We build these experiences across multiple devices, including the Echo Family, Fire TVs, Fire Tablets, and many more. These experiences touch every aspect of news, from lean-back ("Alexa, what's the news?") to specific questions ("Alexa, what's the latest with the election?"). Our teams work in a fast-paced environment with people who are passionate about our customers, experiences, and systems. As a member of the team, you should be able to learn new concepts quickly and feel at home in a new and constantly evolving space.

The Role

We are looking for a Software Development Engineer to drive and define the technology and product vision for how Alexa helps in the household, delights customers, and continues to make Alexa News a key part of everyone's day.

As a Software Development Engineer on the team, you will help define the software architecture to support this vision and work alongside a team of developers to implement it. You will work closely with Product Managers and your development counterparts to deeply understand customer needs, iteratively refine the product, and continuously improve the customer experience. A core part of our mission is building intelligent systems that understand customer preferences and deliver highly personalized, contextually relevant news — making every interaction feel tailored and meaningful. In addition, you will collaborate on cross-organizational projects, ensuring our service and other Amazon services are designed to work in conjunction.

We are looking for passionate, hardworking, and talented Software Engineers with experience building innovative, mission-critical, high-volume applications and services. You will have an enormous opportunity to make a large impact on the design, architecture, and implementation of high-quality products used every day by people you know — products that learn, adapt, and deliver the most relevant content to millions of customers around the world.

Key job responsibilities

• Define software architecture for complex solutions, identifying current limitations and compatibility between subsystems, selecting appropriate concepts and methodologies, and developing core systems and components.
• Lead coding and software development of complex, cross-functional, customer-facing programs.
• Design and implement system architecture and underlying components; establish design principles, select design patterns, and instill software development best practices across multiple teams.
• Anticipate bottlenecks and manage trade-offs, balancing business needs against technical constraints while providing escalation management when needed.
• Drive technical consensus and collaboration — work effectively with team members to align on technical decisions and execute them. Our mission is ambitious, and close collaboration with fellow engineers is essential to our success.
• Champion engineering excellence by ensuring appropriate software engineering practices are employed to consistently deliver high-quality results.

A day in the life

You will be collaborating with your peers to find solutions to build and improve our services. Your peers include other engineers, voice and visual designers, program managers and product managers. You will work in groups to find the best solution for our customers and build and maintain the software to bring those solutions to our customers.

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

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.