Software Development Manager, 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 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.

If you’re passionate about building magical experiences for customers, while solving hard, complex technical problems, then this role is for you. Work across internal teams along with the world’s top music partners to deliver industry leading experiences across a growing array of Alexa supported devices and countries, all while being at the forefront of Generative AI and LLM capabilities.

We are looking for a highly motivated, top notch software development leader with both business and technical acumen. You will have the opportunity to build, scale and shape the direction of this business, using LLMs/GenAI. This role requires deep technical expertise, excellent leadership skills, and strong business judgment. You will be responsible for services that can be deployed globally, delivering an exceptional customer experience, provide thought leadership in a fast-paced development environment, and partner with product management and senior leaders to ensure the success of this program.

If you enjoy dealing with high ambiguity, complexity and broad scope that will be at the epicenter of our initiative, come join us!

Key job responsibilities

1. Be responsible for the end to end ownership of a technology team, including setting the technical vision for developing our systems to serve Alexa's needs.
2. Build and manage great software engineers that are responsible for developing and maintaining software.
3. Be an advocate of engineering and operational excellence.
4. Establish a consistent, project management framework and excellent development processes to deliver high quality software, in rapid iterations.
5. Show strong business and technical judgment that will accelerate time to market of releases, while incrementally moving our services towards the long term vision.
6. Be responsible for mentoring and developing engineers.
7. Represent the technical organization and evangelize the work to senior leadership.
8. Raise the bar on technical excellence, show thought leadership, and communicate well to different audiences.

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.

Basic Qualifications

• 7+ years of engineering experience
• 3+ years of engineering team management experience
• Knowledge of engineering practices and patterns for the full software/hardware/networks development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, certification, and livesite operations
• Experience partnering with product or program management teams
• 8+ years of leading the definition and development of multi tier web services experience
• 3+ years of designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and senior leadership to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical designs, and product strategy
• Experience in recruiting, hiring, mentoring/coaching and managing teams of Software Engineers to improve their skills, and make them more effective, product software engineers

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