Software Development Manager, Items and Relationships Platform

Amazon's Item Identity team is building the definitive source of truth for every product in the world's largest catalog — a GenAI-powered identity platform that must reason across text, images, and structured data to answer a deceptively simple question: what is this product? Amazon's catalog is highly diverse, ranging from movies to books, groceries to pharmaceuticals, and cars to industrial equipment — each with its own identity challenges, serving hundreds of millions of customers and millions of sellers worldwide. We are looking for a Software Development Manager to lead the team that establishes and maintains product identity at this unprecedented scale — ensuring one product, one identity, worldwide. This is a role for an engineering leader who is fluent in ML/GenAI systems where quality is probabilistic, decisions are gated on confidence, and the bar is nothing less than customer trust. You will build and lead the team that owns product identity: deciding what a product is, recording it as a single trusted source of truth, and keeping it accurate over the product's lifecycle.

Key job responsibilities
- Lead the design of GenAI/ML systems that reason across text, images, and structured data at massive catalog scale
- Define and communicate a clear technical vision and multi-year roadmap, sequencing delivery to balance near-term customer impact with long-term platform investment
- Balance speed and accuracy so friction hits only where identity is genuinely uncertain
- Define and drive the quality bar using measurable outcomes tied to customer and seller experience
- Partner across engineering, product, and science, and represent direction to senior leaders
- Establish operational excellence: reliability, scalability, security, and cost efficiency with clear metrics and mechanisms to sustain quality as the system scales
- Hire, develop, and retain the team, and raise the engineering and operational-excellence bar

A day in the life
You lead a team building the platform that determines what a product is and keeps that identity accurate over time. A typical day moves between setting technical direction with your engineers and scientists, unblocking delivery, and reviewing quality signals. You partner with product managers, applied scientists, and peer engineering teams on shared interfaces, and align with senior leaders on roadmap and tradeoffs. Your customers are Amazon shoppers, who receive the product they expect; sellers, who list without needless friction; and internal teams that consume identity. The problems you solve: deciding identity confidently from ambiguous data, preventing duplicates and false conflicts, and sustaining quality at massive scale.

About the team
Item Identity builds the foundation that lets Amazon know, precisely and consistently, what every product in its catalog is. Our mission is: one product, one identity worldwide, so shoppers get exactly what they expect, sellers list without needless friction, and every downstream system can trust a single source of truth. We work at the frontier of applied GenAI at catalog scale, pairing strong engineering with applied science. Our culture is ownership-driven, data-informed, and deeply customer-obsessed: we debate hard problems openly, earn trust through working software, and measure ourselves by the quality we deliver, not the activity we generate.

Basic Qualifications

- 3+ years of engineering team management experience
- 7+ years of working directly within engineering teams experience
- 3+ years of designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- 8+ years of leading the definition and development of multi tier web services 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

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

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

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, WA, Seattle - 184,900.00 - 250,200.00 USD annually