Software Development Manager, AI Studios

DESCRIPTION

Join us as a Software Development Manager in the AI Studios Engineering org within Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, where you’ll lead teams building intelligent systems at the intersection of AI and cinematic storytelling. This role offers an exciting opportunity to help build Nara, our AI-native content creation platform that empowers creators to produce professional animation and live action content featuring world-class intellectual properties at unprecedented speed and scale.

In this role, you’ll lead teams responsible for building production-quality code for AI-powered creative tools while mentoring experienced engineers and scientists. You’ll work alongside creative professionals (animators, filmmakers, and storytellers) delivering features that directly transform how animation and live action/VFX content is made for Prime Video’s most ambitious productions. This is an ideal opportunity for leaders who are passionate about AI/ML applications in entertainment and want to grow their skills while contributing to industry-defining products featuring iconic IPs.

Key job responsibilities

• Lead and mentor engineering teams building production-quality software for our AI-native content creation platform, supporting professional animation and live action/VFX workflows
• Drive technical strategy and architecture decisions across the stack: backend services, media processing pipelines, APIs, ML model integrations, and creator-facing tooling, ensuring systems scale with production demands
• Establish and maintain high engineering standards through code review practices, testing strategies, and development processes that produce clean, reliable, and maintainable software
• Partner with cross-functional leaders including ML scientists, applied scientists, product managers, and creative professionals to translate ambiguous requirements into clear engineering roadmaps and deliverables
• Own integrations with industry-standard Digital Content Creation (DCC) tools such as Adobe Animate, After Effects, Maya, and Storyboard Pro, coordinating across teams to deliver seamless creator experiences
• Drive operational excellence for production systems, owning reliability, incident response, monitoring, and on-call processes while continuously raising the bar on system health
• Recruit, develop, and retain top engineering talent, fostering a culture of technical growth, constructive feedback, and ownership
• Stay current on AI/ML systems, media processing, and distributed computing trends, making build-vs-buy decisions and identifying opportunities to accelerate delivery through new technologies

A day in the life
As an SDM on the AI Studios team, you’ll split your time between people leadership, technical strategy, and cross-functional collaboration. A typical day
might include reviewing architecture proposals for our creator tooling platform, unblocking your team on a complex live action VFX pipeline integration, or
partnering with ML scientists to prioritize model improvements based on creator feedback. What makes this role unique is the opportunity to work on-site alongside VFX artists and creative professionals, observing how your team’s tools perform in real production workflows, identifying where creators
struggle, and directing engineering effort toward the highest-impact improvements. You’ll run team standups, drive sprint planning, and facilitate retrospectives while maintaining enough technical depth to guide design decisions and evaluate tradeoffs. You’ll coach engineers through increasingly
complex challenges, shape team roadmaps that balance innovation with operational excellence, and represent your team’s work to senior leadership, all while building technology that powers content featuring world-class IPs.

About the team
We’re part of the Engineering org within newly established Prime Video’s AI Studios Division, pioneering AI-native cinematic content creation. Our mission is to establish Amazon MGM Studios as the definitive leader in AI-enabled content creation—giving creators unprecedented control over AI outputs while materially reducing production costs and timelines for animation and live action productions featuring world-class intellectual properties. Our engineering team spans distributed systems engineers building scalable infrastructure, ML engineers optimizing model training and inference, and full-stack engineers crafting intuitive interfaces for cr…