AmazonPosted 2mo ago

Principal Software Engineer, Prime Video Commerce Tech

Principal Software Engineer, Prime Video Commerce Tech at Amazon scores 26 out of 100 on AI centrality, which makes it AI Level 1 of 4 (Little AI) on this board. The level measures how much of the work is AI, not seniority.

IN, KA, Bengaluruleadfull-time

AI in this role

When a customer opens Prime Video anywhere in the world - on a Fire TV in Mumbai, a phone in Tokyo, a browser in Berlin - a commerce system determines if they are entitled to watch a content, what it costs, and how they pay. That system is ours.
The Prime Video Commerce team in Bengaluru owns the offers and payments transaction path for hundreds of millions of customers globally. We process millions of requests per second across high double-digit countries, spanning every device type, multiple currencies, and dozens of payment methods - with four-nines availability targets. We support the full spectrum of Prime Video monetisation: ad-free and ad-enabled subscriptions, transactional purchases and rentals, channel subscriptions, with how we pay for them – every payment method in a country, and payment type – at once, in installments.
This is not a role where the architecture is settled, and you maintain it. We are at an inflection point - evolving from product-line silos into a unified orchestration platform, decoupling payment logic from the commerce stack, closing the gap to four-nines availability, and shaping what comes next: better support for an agent interaction, better pricing rules and so on. We are hiring a Principal Engineer to own the end-to-end technical vision across both Offers and Payments, because a customer discovering an offer, selecting it, and completing payment is one continuous flow — and the leader who resolves the architectural fragmentation must span domains and Amazon verticals.

Key job responsibilities
• Lead the technical direction for the commerce platform’s offer-to-payment architecture, making critical decisions on system design, service boundaries, and data contracts for performance, scalability, and resilience at millions of TPS
• Define and drive a multi-year architecture transformation – to improve resiliency, monitorability, and to deliver flexibility and speed
• Be Hands on to deliver goals tracked at the Amazon executive bench level
• Drive innovation in AI/GenAI-powered commerce - designing agent-callable service interfaces, AI-native development workflows, and intelligent decision making systems
• Collaborate across multiple organizations to align technical vision and priorities, influencing decisions at VP level & above without direct authority
• Define best practices for system architecture, operational excellence, and engineering processes — maintaining high standards for software quality, availability, and cost efficiency
• Mentor and develop senior engineers toward Principal-level scope, fostering technical growth through design reviews, architecture guidance, and hands-on pairing
• Lead engineering efforts that directly improve customer experience — reducing transaction failures, improving latency, and enabling commerce at global scale
• Establish and champion AI-native engineering practices across the organisation, including spec-driven development, GenAI-assisted automation, and AI-powered operational tooling

A day in the life
Your days are varied - and that’s the point. This role sits at the intersection of deep technical work, delivery of business goals, organizational influence, and talent development. On any given week, you might be writing a technical vision document that dozens of engineers will build against; sitting with a fellow engineer to walk through a design and build their confidence to own bigger problems; challenges customer experiences we build; leading an architecture review where three teams with competing constraints need to converge on a shared interface; deep-diving into a production incident to identify the systemic pattern and design the architecture that prevents the entire class of failure; or prototyping a proof-of-concept that validates a critical architectural assumption before the team invests months of execution.
You hold a high technical bar and an equally high bar for how you treat people. You operate across time zones with genuine empathy. You’re as comfortable whiteboarding a distributed systems problem as you are coaching someone through a difficult career conversation. You don’t just set direction — you make the people around you capable of carrying it forward without you.

About the team
We are the Prime Video Commerce Offers team in Bengaluru — engineers across all levels and managers who build and own the commerce experiences that customers across the globe interact with every day. We're proud of what we've built, and we're just getting started.
We are a worldwide team, and we operate like one. That means working across time zones with genuine empathy — understanding that your counterpart in Seattle or London has a life outside of work, just as you do, and that great collaboration doesn't require anyone to sacrifice their personal time.
Inclusivity isn't a value we list on a slide — it's how we work. We believe the best ideas come from diverse perspectives, and we actively create space for every voice to be heard, regardless of level, background, or tenure.

Basic qualifications

• 12+ years of software development experience with deep expertise in distributed systems
• Track record of leading architecture transformations across multiple teams and services (not just designing — driving adoption)
• Experience operating systems at large scale (millions of TPS) with high availability
• Demonstrated ability to influence without authority across organizational boundaries
• Hands-on practitioner: you write code, review designs, and prototype — not just govern from a distance
• Experience with service-oriented architecture evolution (decomposition, interface harmonization, platform building)

Preferred qualifications

• Commerce, payments, or subscription systems at global scale (multi-currency, multi-territory, regulatory complexity)
• Hands-on experience with AI/GenAI — both as a development practice (AI-native SDLC) and as a system capability (agent-callable services, intelligent decision making)
• Experience with resiliency engineering (graceful degradation, blast-radius isolation, chaos testing)
• Track record of mentoring senior engineers toward Principal-level scope and judgment
• Rapid experimentation: building simulation/forecasting frameworks or ML-driven recommendation systems
• International expansion experience (local payment methods, regulatory compliance, market-specific adaptation)

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.