Software Development Manager, Alexa for shopping (Rufus)

Description We’re building the future of AI-powered shopping. Our team is developing next-generation conversational and agentic experiences powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling customers to discover products, ask complex shopping questions, compare options, receive personalized recommendations, and accomplish shopping tasks in entirely new ways.

Alexa for Shopping brings together Amazon’s AI-powered shopping experiences, including Rufus, our expert shopping assistant trained on Amazon’s product catalog and information from across the web. Rufus helps customers answer product questions, perform product comparisons, receive recommendations based on their shopping context, and facilitate product discovery - all within the Amazon shopping experience.

We’re looking for the best and brightest across Amazon to help us realize and deliver this vision to our customers right away.

More specifically, this role is in a team that is building new software systems and customer experiences that will greatly expand Rufus’s availability to new cohorts of customers. The team is building agentic AI systems powered by LLMs, working at the intersection of cutting-edge AI technology and one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms. This team is considered strategic and has visibility with leadership at the highest levels.

The role offers a chance to build and launch AI-powered customer experiences from the ground up, and work closely with an exceptional group of product, engineering, and science leaders to shape the future of shopping at Amazon.

Key job responsibilities

• Influence the strategic direction and vision of the organization through an understanding of the intersection of business/customer needs and how these intersect with technical capabilities and opportunities.
• Provide technical leadership, vision and career guidance to team members.
• Create a culture of pride in engineering and operational excellence and drive best practices within teams and across organization.
• Be strategic about defining and building a engineering culture that takes ownership and delivers high performance engineering solutions.
• Work closely with technical (engineering and science) teams, design, and product/program management in an agile environment to deliver the best technical designs and approaches.
• Anticipate bottlenecks, provide escalation management, anticipate and make trade-offs, and balance the business needs versus technical constraints.

A day in the life

This Software Development Manager Will

• Manage a highly talented team of SDEs on the Rufus Agentic team, building scalable software systems and customer experiences powered by AI and LLM technologies. The role involves interacting with product, program, engineering, science, and other Rufus and broader Amazon teams to clarify requirements and build execution plans for the team.
• Define tactical actions to unblock the team and lay out a strategic quarter- or year-long vision for the team to improve its efficiency and deliver better AI-powered solutions for Amazon’s customers.

Basic Qualifications

• Experience managing a team of high calibre Software Engineers developing complex, world class, scalable software systems that have been successfully delivered to customers
• Experience designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems
• Experience delivering products against plan in a fast-paced, multi-disciplined, distributed-responsibility and often ambiguous environment
• 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 in leading the definition and development of multi tier web services
• Experience partnering with product and 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
• Experience building products leveraging large language models, generative AI, or agentic AI systems

Amazon is an equ…