Software Development Engineer

Amazon is hiring a Software Development Engineer in New York, United States. It pays $158k-$214k 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.
Level classifies it as a mid-level role.
Level lists 21,000+ other open roles at Amazon.
The role was posted in the last few days.

AI in this role

The Off-Search Online Sourcing team builds the real-time ad retrieval systems behind every Detail Page, Home Page, and non-Search surface on Amazon — searching hundreds of millions of ads in milliseconds using embedding models and approximate nearest neighbor indexes. You'll design and deliver the low-latency services, model serving infrastructure, and distributed indexing pipelines that determine which ads shoppers see, enriched with delivery speed, locality, and return signals so ads surface products that can reach customers quickly.

This is a team that ships fast — rapidly experimenting with new models, indexes, and signals in production through A/B experiments to grow both advertiser results and shopper engagement. You'll partner closely with applied scientists to bring new retrieval models from research into production, and use experimental results to decide what ships.

Key job responsibilities
- Design and develop high-throughput, low-latency services that retrieve and enrich ad candidates within strict latency budgets across Amazon's non-Search surfaces
- Build and scale model serving infrastructure for real-time embedding inference, partnering with applied scientists to bring new retrieval models into production
- Develop distributed indexing pipelines that build and refresh large approximate nearest neighbor search indexes across hundreds of millions of ads
- Deliver real-time fulfillment signals — delivery speed, locality, return eligibility — that improve ad filtering and ranking quality for shoppers
- Launch new retrieval models and indexes behind A/B experiments, analyze results, and use data to decide what ships to production
- Deliver features end to end — from design and code reviews through implementation, deployment, monitoring, and on-call operations
- Improve operational excellence through caching, graceful degradation, monitoring, and root-cause analysis
- Mentor peers through code and design reviews, helping raise the engineering quality bar across the team

A day in the life
On a typical day you might start by reviewing latency dashboards for your retrieval services, then dive into building a new distributed pipeline to refresh a nearest neighbor index. After lunch, you could be partnering with an applied scientist to integrate a new embedding model into the serving path, setting up the A/B experiment framework to measure its impact. Between coding sessions, you'll review pull requests, debug a latency regression, and check on the results of a running experiment to decide whether a new signal improves shopper engagement enough to ship.

About the team
The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through industry-leading generative AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences, bridging human creativity with artificial intelligence to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle from ad creation and optimization to performance analysis and customer insights. We are a passionate group of innovators dedicated to developing responsible and intelligent AI technologies that balance the needs of advertisers, enhance the shopping experience, and strengthen the marketplace.

The Off-Search Online Sourcing team within SPB builds the real-time systems that choose which ads shoppers see on the Detail Page, Home Page, and other Amazon pages — searching hundreds of millions of ads in milliseconds using embedding models and approximate nearest neighbor indexes, and enriching every candidate with delivery speed, locality, and return signals so shoppers see ads for products that can reach them quickly.

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
- 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
- Experience building low-latency, high-throughput distributed services
- Experience with search or vector retrieval systems, such as Lucene, Elasticsearch or approximate nearest neighbor indexes
- Experience serving machine learning or generative AI models in production
- Experience with large-scale data processing, such as Spark
- Background in advertising technology, recommendation systems or e-commerce platforms

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, NY, New York - 158,100.00 - 213,800.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Software Development Engineer at Amazon rates 88 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.

Classification

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.

Key facts

Software Development Engineer is an open job at Amazon.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed salary is $158k-$214k a year.
The role is based in US, NY, New York.
The job was posted on October 22, 2026.
Seniority: mid.
Applications are handled by Amazon. Apply on Amazon

Prepare for this job

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Pay

This job starts at: $158k
Typical software engineer job: $168k

This posting starts 6% below the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

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