Software Development Engineer, Amazon Q

AI in this role

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Amazon Q is helping redefine how developers and cloud practitioners build, operate, troubleshoot, and optimize on AWS. We are building an intelligent assistant that goes beyond answering questions—combining generative AI with AWS context, retrieval, tools, and actions to help customers understand their environments and get work done faster.

Building these experiences creates challenging engineering problems. How do you ground an LLM's response in relevant and up-to-date information from a customer's AWS environment while maintaining strong security boundaries and low latency? How do you build agentic experiences that can reason, retrieve information, invoke tools, and take actions reliably and safely? How do you measure and improve the quality of AI-powered experiences when traditional software testing alone is not enough?

We are looking for a Software Development Engineer to help build the next generation of Amazon Q. You will work at the intersection of generative AI, agentic systems, and large-scale distributed services, developing customer-facing capabilities used across AWS.

In this role, you will own meaningful features and components from design through production. You will work closely with other engineers, product managers, applied scientists, UX partners, and teams across AWS to translate customer needs into scalable technical solutions. You will contribute to architectural decisions, implement production-quality software, and continuously improve the reliability, performance, and quality of the systems you own.

This is an opportunity to work on emerging generative AI technologies while solving real distributed-systems problems at AWS scale.

Key job responsibilities
As a Software Development Engineer on the Amazon Q team, you will:

Build: Design, implement, test, and launch customer-facing Amazon Q capabilities and the backend services that power them. Build systems that connect foundation models with AWS knowledge, customer context, retrieval systems, APIs, tools, and actions.
Solve: Work independently on complex engineering problems involving generative AI, distributed systems, contextual grounding, retrieval, tool execution, agentic workflows, latency, reliability, and security.
Own: Take ownership of features and services throughout their lifecycle—from requirements and technical design through implementation, deployment, operations, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement.
Design: Contribute to system architecture and technical designs, evaluate engineering trade-offs, participate in design reviews, and help build solutions that are scalable, maintainable, secure, and cost effective.
Operate: Build reliable production systems with strong engineering practices around testing, observability, monitoring, deployment, operational readiness, and incident response. Use operational and customer signals to identify and address opportunities for improvement.
Collaborate and innovate: Work closely with engineers, applied scientists, product managers, and partner teams to bring advances in foundation models, retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI into production. Participate in code reviews, share technical knowledge, and help raise the engineering quality of the team.

A day in the life
We’re on the lookout for the curious, those who think big and want to define the world of tomorrow. At Amazon, you will grow into the high impact person you know you’re ready to be. Every day will be filled with exciting new challenges, developing new skills, and achieving personal growth. How often can you say that your work changes the world? At Amazon, you’ll say it often. Join us and define tomorrow.

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
- 1+ years of software development engineer or related occupational experience
- 1+ years of designing and developing large-scale, multi-tiered, multi-threaded, embedded or distributed software applications, tools, systems, and services using: C#, C++, Java, or Perl experience
- 1+ years of Object Oriented Design experience
- Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
- 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, VA, Arlington - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Software Development Engineer, Amazon Q at Amazon rates 16 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.