Software Development Engineer, Time & Pay Innovation

AI in this role

Amazon is one of the largest employers on the planet with hundreds of thousands of employees across the globe. Come join us in our journey to deliver solutions for one of the most complex domains in People eXperience Technology (PXT). Your code determines how Amazon associates get paid — accurately, on time, every single day. As an SDE-II in TAA, you own and deliver features across one of Amazon's most critical real-time platforms: a high-throughput, event-driven architecture processing millions of IoT punch events globally. You don't just write code — you own systems. We own and deliver technology to manage employee time expectations and compute their pay, globally, for all our current and emerging businesses. At the core, we are in the business of analytics — real-time and event-driven — of data collected from IoT devices (time clocks) and web user interfaces. We own our own high-availability services to support this processing, and require the ability to work from replay-able, auditable "truth" for any point in an employee's timeline. Our business rules are complex and arcane, varying by role, business, and jurisdiction. We are solving all these problems at Amazon scale, an order of magnitude larger than supported by any commodity solutions and growing exponentially.

We are looking for a Software Development Engineer II who is a strong, independent builder with growing design maturity. You take ownership of significant features and components, drive them from design through production, and operate them with high standards. You write high-quality code, make sound technical decisions with appropriate trade-offs, and proactively improve the systems you touch. You are developing your ability to influence design direction, mentor junior engineers, and think beyond your immediate deliverables to the health of the broader system.

Key job responsibilities
* Own the design and delivery of significant features and components across scalable, multi-tiered applications and services. Drive projects from requirements through design, implementation, testing, deployment, and production operation.
Write high-quality, well-tested production code using modern languages, design patterns, and frameworks. Hold yourself and your peers to high standards through thorough code reviews.
* Make sound technical decisions with appropriate trade-offs. Evaluate options for caching, retry strategies, concurrency, and data modeling. Justify your choices and communicate trade-offs clearly.
Design and build for scale and resilience. Consider failure modes, rate limits, traffic bursts, and downstream dependency health in your designs. Implement patterns like backpressure, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation.
* Own operational excellence for your systems. Monitor production health, respond to alarms, investigate root causes, and drive fixes. Write runbooks, improve observability, and reduce operational burden over time.
Contribute to system-level design discussions. Participate actively in design reviews — propose solutions, challenge assumptions, and help the team arrive at better architectures.
Mentor junior engineers. Support SDE-Is through code reviews, pairing sessions, and technical guidance. Help them grow their skills and develop good engineering habits.
* Understand and translate business requirements. Work with stakeholders to understand complex domain rules across punch processing, attendance, scheduling, and compliance. Turn ambiguous requirements into clear technical designs.
Identify and resolve technical debt proactively. Improve code quality, simplify complex logic, optimize performance, and refactor systems to support future growth — without being asked.
Contribute to team processes and culture. Participate in sprint planning, retrospectives, and on-call rotations. Raise the bar for engineering practices and help improve team velocity.

A day in the life
You start the day reviewing a design you wrote for a new feature in the compliance system — incorporating feedback from a senior engineer on edge cases around jurisdiction-specific rules. You update the design, get alignment, and start building. Mid-morning, you review a code change from a junior engineer, leaving constructive feedback on error handling and test coverage. After lunch, you investigate a latency spike in one of your services — tracing requests through logs and metrics, identifying a downstream throttling issue, and implementing a retry optimization. You join a design review for a cross-team project, asking questions about failure modes and proposing an alternative caching approach. You close the day deploying your feature to a pre-production environment, validating metrics, and updating the team on progress in standup.

About the team
We are Time and Attendance (TAA) team within People eXperience Technology (PXT). Our team builds and operates the technology that powers how Amazon tracks, manages, and compensates employee time — globally, across all business lines and geographies.

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

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.

How we score this

Software Development Engineer, Time & Pay Innovation at Amazon scores 33 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it AI Level 1 of 4 (Little AI). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

AI Level 1. The work itself involves no AI, or AI only appears as scenery, such as a company tagline.