Software Development Engineer II, AWS SageMaker AI

Amazon is hiring a Software Development Engineer II, AWS SageMaker AI in Bellevue, United States. It pays $144k-$194k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Amazon.

Level's read on this job

On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
Tools and skills the posting cites include PyTorch, SageMaker and Python.
Level classifies it as a mid-level role.
Level lists 20,000+ other open roles at Amazon.

AI in this role

Design and operate distributed orchestration services and infrastructure for foundation model training at AWS SageMaker AI.

pytorchsagemakerpythonkubernetesawsaws-sagemakeraws-trainium

distributed-systemssoftware-engineeringcloud-computingmachine-learning-infrastructure

At AWS SageMaker AI, we're making it easy to build state-of-the-art foundation models on the cloud. Model Factory is our platform for building, training, customizing, and evaluating foundation models at scale. Instead of hand-chaining data prep, distributed training, evaluation, and deployment across thousands of GPU and AWS Trainium devices, Model Factory lets teams express the whole lifecycle as a single, contract-validated workflow — orchestrated, reproducible, and fully managed. As LLMs and Generative AI scale, Model Factory is the platform that turns frontier training research into a reliable, repeatable pipeline for our internal teams and customers.

We're looking for a Software Development Engineer to help design, build, and operate the distributed systems at the core of this platform — the orchestration engine, compute integrations, SDK and contract layer, and the infrastructure that runs large-scale training and customization jobs. You'll own components end-to-end, from design through delivery and on-call operations, and work closely with the ML scientists and platform teams who depend on Model Factory every day. You'll turn requirements into robust, scalable, supportable services that fit cleanly into the overall architecture, uphold a high engineering bar, and grow your scope and technical leadership as you go.

A successful candidate has a strong software-engineering foundation, writes high-quality distributed-systems and services code, communicates clearly, and is motivated to deliver results in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment.

Key job responsibilities
As a Software Development Engineer on the SageMaker AI team, you will:
- Design, build, test, and operate services that orchestrate foundation-model data preparation, training, evaluation, and deployment as reliable, contract-validated workflows.
- Own delivery of individual components end-to-end — from design and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and on-call operations.
- Build and extend compute-backend integrations and job launchers — submitting, monitoring, and recovering large-scale training jobs across SageMaker (Training/Processing/HyperPod), EMR, AWS Batch, and Kubernetes/EKS.
- Improve the platform's resiliency and operability for long-running distributed jobs — checkpoint/resume, fault detection and recovery, retries, and observability (metrics, logging, experiment tracking).
- Contribute to the SDK, workflow orchestration, and schema/contract layer that teams use to declare and run jobs, and to the CDK infrastructure that deploys the platform.
- Integrate containerized training and evaluation frameworks (e.g., PyTorch/FSDP, verl, NeMo/Megatron) into the platform's task and recipe model.
- Contribute to design and architecture discussions, write clear technical designs, and uphold engineering best practices (code review, testing, operational readiness).
- Collaborate with ML scientists and internal customers to translate training requirements into reliable, self-service platform capabilities, and help onboard and mentor interns and new engineers as you grow.

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
- - Experience with workflow/pipeline orchestration (Airflow, Step Functions, or similar) and event-driven or service-oriented architectures.
- - Experience with container and cluster compute (Kubernetes/EKS, Ray, Slurm, AWS Batch) and cloud infrastructure-as-code (AWS CDK/CloudFormation).
- - Experience building and operating fully-managed cloud services at scale, including resiliency, checkpointing, and fault tolerance for long-running jobs.
- - Familiarity with machine-learning / deep-learning training workflows, GPU/accelerator compute (SageMaker HyperPod, AWS Trainium, P5-class GPUs), or distributed-training frameworks (PyTorch FSDP, Megatron-LM, DeepSpeed, verl).

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, BELLEVUE - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Software Development Engineer II, AWS SageMaker AI 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.

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 II, AWS SageMaker AI is an open job at Amazon.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed salary is $144k-$194k a year.
The role is based in US, WA, Bellevue.
The job was posted on August 5, 2026.
Seniority: mid.
Applications are handled by Amazon. Apply on Amazon

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Distributed SystemsSoftware EngineeringCloud ComputingMachine Learning InfrastructurePyTorchSageMakerPythonKubernetes

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Python Machine learning AI agents TypeScript RAG Google Cloud

Pay

This job starts at: $144k
Typical software engineer job: $168k

This posting starts 14% below the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where software engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where cloud computing was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where machine learning infrastructure was part of your work. What did you do?
Walk me through how you've used PyTorch in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: Distributed Systems, Software Engineering, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning Infrastructure, and PyTorch. 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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