Software Development Engineer III

Prime Video Personalization and Discovery (PVPD) is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer to join a small, high-caliber team building the next generation of Prime Video's AI-powered content discovery experience. We are reinventing how customers find something to watch: instead of browsing and scrolling, customers tell Prime Video what they're in the mood for, through natural language conversation, personalized prompts, and interactive recommendations woven directly into the product. You'll work alongside a hand-picked group of senior engineers and applied scientists, each bringing deep expertise in their domain, moving fast on a high-visibility initiative with significant ambiguity. You'll own your area of the system end-to-end: designing, building, and operating the services that combine large language models with Prime Video's personalization, catalog, and engagement signals to deliver conversational discovery at massive scale.

Key job responsibilities
Own the design, implementation, and operation of core components of Prime Video's conversational discovery platform, delivering production-quality systems in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment
- Design hybrid approaches that combine LLM-based semantic understanding with traditional personalization and ranking signals for content discovery and recommendation
- Partner closely with applied scientists and fellow senior engineers to prototype, evaluate, and productionize LLM-powered features including personalized conversation starters, natural language query understanding, multi-turn dialogue, and contextual recommendations
- Optimize LLM inference for latency, cost, and quality at the scale of one of the world's largest streaming services
- Build evaluation and quality-gating mechanisms that measure relevance, personalization, diversity, and safety of LLM-generated content before and after launch - Contribute significant code, conduct thorough code reviews, and raise the engineering bar across the team
- Uphold operational excellence for Tier-1 customer-facing AI systems, including on-call participation, root cause analysis, and driving reliability improvements
- Collaborate across team and organizational boundaries to integrate with partner systems spanning inference infrastructure, feature storage, and experimentation platforms

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

Preferred Qualifications

- 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.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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, CA, Sunnyvale - 193,300.00 - 261,500.00 USD annually
USA, NY, New York - 184,900.00 - 250,200.00 USD annually
USA, WA, SEATTLE - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually