AmazonSoftware Development Engineer, Ads AI Core Infra
Amazon is hiring a Software Development Engineer, Ads AI Core Infra in Seattle, United States. It pays $144k-$194k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.
AI in this role
Software engineer building petabyte-scale data infrastructure and MCP-enabled AI interfaces for Amazon Ads AI core data lake.
Spektr is Amazon Ads' exabyte-scale central data lake: the unified catalog for petabytes of campaign, ad-serving, billing, and measurement data. Hundreds of teams and Amazon's advertiser-facing AI agents depend on it for discovery, ingestion, transformation, and querying at scale. If you want large-scale engineering with tangible business impact, this is the team.
We're rebuilding Spektr ground-up with an AI-first architecture, and building fully-automated domain agents that let customers manage their big data lifecycle in a single click. In parallel, we're adopting Apache Iceberg / S3 Tables with serverless compute, scaling horizontally via a data mesh pattern for 5× growth in volume and demand. If you thrive on greenfield experimentation and shipping things that matter to the business, keep reading.
As an SDE on this team, you will own the core platform services that power Amazon Ads data infrastructure, consolidating legacy systems into clean, API-first services that cut job creation time from weeks to less than a day. You will build MCP-enabled AI interfaces that let AI agents create and run data pipelines on Spektr at 99%+ success rate, directly shaping how GenAI discovers and consumes data across Amazon Ads. You will design and operate high-scale Java services on AWS-native infrastructure (Spark, EMR Serverless, Kinesis, Step Functions), processing petabytes of data daily at 99.9% availability. You will also drive deployment automation, replacing manual release cycles with CI/CD pipelines that accelerate delivery velocity for a platform serving Tier-1 advertising data systems.
Key job responsibilities
- Engage with key decision makers such as Product & Program Managers to understand customer requirements and brainstorm on solutions
- Design, code and deploy components and micro-services for the core job management pipeline
- Ensure testability, maintanability and low operational footprint for your code
- Participate in operational responsibilities with your team
- Innovate on AWS technology to improve latency, reduce cost and operations
A day in the life
- Focus on core engineering opportunities to guarantee system availability that matches our data growth
- Work with a skilled team of engineers, managers and decision makers to consistently meet customer demand
- Automate monitoring of data availability, quality and usability via simplified metrics and drive innovations to improve guarantees for our customers
About the team
The mission of the Ads Datalake team is to provide data that helps the advertising organization make informed analyses and decisions for our customers and to determine and deploy investments for future growth via a set of central and unified products and services.
Our team focuses on simplicity, usability, speed, compliance, cost efficiency and enabling high-velocity decision making so our customers can generate high quality insights faster.
We are a global team with presence across India and North America.
Basic qualifications
- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience programming with at least one software programming language
Preferred qualifications
- 3+ 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.
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 - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually
How we rate this
Software Development Engineer, Ads AI Core Infra at Amazon rates 80 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.
Prepare for this job
A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where java was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where data engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where ai infrastructure was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, Distributed Systems, Java, Data Engineering, and AI Infrastructure. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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