Sr. Software Development Engineer, Amazon Q

AI in this role

Build generative AI agentic systems and scalable distributed infrastructure for Amazon Q.

awsllms

ai-agentsgenerative-aiagentic-workflowsdistributed-systemsretrieval-augmented-generation

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 deep AWS context, retrieval, tools, and actions to help customers understand their environments and get work done faster.

Building this experience introduces a new class of engineering challenges. How do you ground an LLM's response in relevant, up-to-date information from a customer's AWS environment while maintaining strong security boundaries and low latency? How do you orchestrate multi-step agentic workflows that can reason, retrieve information, invoke tools, and take actions reliably and safely? How do you evaluate AI systems where quality cannot be measured by traditional software testing alone? These are the kinds of problems you will help solve.

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

As a Senior SDE, you will provide technical leadership for complex and ambiguous initiatives. You will work closely with engineers, product managers, applied scientists, UX partners, and teams across AWS to define architecture, make critical technical decisions, and translate advances in foundation models, retrieval, reasoning, and agents into secure, reliable production experiences.

This role offers an opportunity to influence both what we build and how we build it—developing new architectures and engineering mechanisms for AI-powered systems while raising the technical bar across the team.

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

Build: Design and deliver major Amazon Q capabilities and the highly available, scalable, secure, and low-latency distributed systems that power them. Build systems that connect foundation models with customer context, AWS knowledge, retrieval systems, APIs, tools, and actions.
Solve: Tackle ambiguous engineering problems unique to production generative AI, including contextual grounding, agent orchestration, tool execution, retrieval, security boundaries, latency, reliability, and mechanisms for evaluating AI quality and effectiveness.
Own: Lead projects end to end—from requirements and architecture through implementation, launch, operations, measurement, and continuous improvement—making thoughtful trade-offs across customer experience, quality, scalability, availability, security, performance, and cost.
Lead: Define technical direction for complex initiatives, influence architecture across Amazon Q and partner teams, and simplify systems as they evolve. Drive high engineering standards across design, testing, observability, deployment, and operational excellence.
Mentor: Raise the technical bar of the organization through design reviews, code reviews, technical discussions, and hands-on development. Mentor engineers and help teams navigate complex architectural and implementation decisions.
Innovate: Work with applied scientists, product leaders, and engineering teams to bring advances in foundation models, retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI into production.

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

- 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

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, VA, Arlington - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Sr. Software Development Engineer, Amazon Q 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. Open the description and count.

Prepare for this job

A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI AgentsGenerative AIAgentic WorkflowsDistributed SystemsRetrieval Augmented GenerationAWSLLMs

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 generative ai was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where agentic workflows 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 retrieval augmented generation was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: AI Agents, Generative AI, Agentic Workflows, Distributed Systems, and Retrieval Augmented Generation. 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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