AmazonSoftware Development Engineer, AI Foundations, Amazon Leo AI Foundations
Amazon is hiring a Software Development Engineer, AI Foundations, Amazon Leo AI Foundations. It pays $168k-$227k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Amazon.
Level's read on this job
- Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this software engineer role: the job is building AI systems.
- The listed pay starts close to the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include AWS, Python and AI agents.
- Level lists 21,000+ other open roles at Amazon.
- The role was posted in the last few days.
AI in this role
Design and build production AI agents and evaluation harnesses to diagnose satellite network issues on AWS.
As a Software Development Engineer on AI Foundations, you will design and build production agentic systems on AWS that reason over real satellite, ground, and network data. You will work directly with principal, Sr. Principal engineers and network operators, and your work will shape how Leo is operated at scale.
Export Control Requirement: Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.
Key job responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate AI agents and services that diagnose network and connectivity issues using telemetry, logs, and engineering knowledge.
- Turn proven engineering tools and data sources into reusable agent tools so teams across Leo can build on them.
- Build evaluation harnesses that measure agent accuracy, coverage, and latency, and use them to gate launches.
- Own your services in production: on-call, operational metrics, root-cause analysis, and security reviews.
- Partner with principal engineers, operators, and program managers to turn ambiguous problems into shipped features.
- Write clear design docs, give thoughtful code reviews, and help teammates adopt agentic development practices.
A day in the life
You might start the morning reviewing overnight evaluation results and spotting a class of network failures your agent misdiagnosed. You trace the gap to a missing data source, then sit down with the principal engineer who owns that subsystem to agree on how to expose their tool to the agent. After lunch you build the integration and add new test cases, then review a teammate's pull request. Late afternoon, you join an operations review where an operator walks through a real incident your agent helped resolve, and you leave with a clear next priority.
About the team
We are an AI-native team of software engineers and applied scientists in Redmond, and we move fast. We use AI in how we build, not only in what we build, so a good idea can be a working experiment the same week and a production capability the next. We think beyond how things have been done, test our ideas against real problems, and keep only what proves itself. We ship lightning fast, and we hold a high bar for quality and production readiness while doing it.
Basic qualifications
- 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
- Experience with Machine Learning and Large Language Model fundamentals, including architecture, training/inference lifecycles, and optimization of model execution
Preferred qualifications
- 5+ 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, Redmond - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually
How we rate this
Software Development Engineer, AI Foundations, Amazon Leo AI Foundations at Amazon rates 90 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. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $168k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts close to the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
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 software development was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
- Walk me through how you've used AWS in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, Software Development, Distributed Systems, Machine learning, and AWS. 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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