Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer, RBS - Tech

The Retail Business Services (RBS) Technology team's mission is to transform the Amazon's e-commerce business through technology, delivering order of magnitude higher speed, scale and impact. This Principal Engineer role leads a strong charter to accelerate business functions currently done manually, by envisioning and developing ML/GenAI-driven Agentic core platforms, thus enabling self-service building of agents to perform cognitive tasks autonomously.

Providing a delightful experience to Amazon's e-commerce customers and selling partners requires thousands of various types of tasks performed by business teams that operate at the interface of the company as well at the heart of it. These teams work with vendors to source products to increase selection and choice for the customers, audit the app/website experience to ensure trustworthy information is provided to customers to enable confident purchases, learn from customer feedback on product reviews and returns, and ensure the inventory is placed at the right location for fast delivery of orders, just to name a few activities. Manual activities reduces speed of operations, introduce undesirable variations and limit scale. Hence there is a need to automate these, while overcoming the challenges of 1) task-by-task automation being inefficient, 2) human cognitive work automation requires equivalent or better intelligent systems, 3) a vast variety of business use cases, and 4) ability to integrate with the existing ecosystem of 100s of tools.

The Principal Engineer owns the charter of defining and building these scalable platforms for automation, leveraging the state-of-the-art technologies such as GenAI and Agentic infrastructure. The role will understand the express and latent needs of the space, by working with business and product teams. Further, the role will define the core services and platforms that will enable rapid automation through leverage of ML/GenAI. These platforms will enable self-service, low-code/no-code automation by deskilling automation development. The Principal Engineer sets the right quality bar for resilience, latency, maintainability, accuracy (precision/recall), usability, security/privacy and efficiency, for the team to adhere to. The ideal candidate is one who thrives on understanding the complexity of software systems, and brings a nuanced understanding of different aspects of automation technologies spanning machine learning and big data processing. Working with the rest of the team, peers and stakeholders, they will lead the technology decisions to empower thousands of task automation, from simple few steps, to complex ones involving several tool integrations and conditional steps. The enormous challenge requires creative thinking and passion to use technology to make customers' and internal teams' lives better.

The Principal Engineer in this role collaborates with the team to grow/mentor talent, review work constructively and create a supportive learning environment. They never lose sight of the customer needs, and tackle ambiguous technical and product challenges to continually find ways to serve them better. They build mechanisms to expand and maintain coverage of the platforms to multiple geographies in which Amazon operates, multi-lingual needs, multitude of product types, and hundreds of teams.

The role will embody the Amazon leadership principles of thinking big while diving deep, learning and inventing to move fast, and build trustful relationships to leverage resources and technologies available, delivering to customer needs and delighting them.


Key job responsibilities
• Technical leadership on our most demanding, cross-functional projects
• Setting the technology vision in alignment with business needs
• Architecting and designing key parts of the core platforms and services
• Working with the team, partners and stakeholders to make optimal technical decisions
• Review the work of, inspire and mentor other engineers
• Build consensus and harmonize on decisions with long-term implications
• Partner with other senior roles (managers, business leaders) to optimize at company/group level
• Set a high technical bar and lead by example
• Exert technical influence over multiple teams, increasing their productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience.

About the team
Amazon's mission is to be the Earth's most customer-centric company. The Stores business within Amazon connects 100s of millions of customers with millions of sellers, to conveniently fulfill their shopping needs. The Retail Business Services Technology team turbocharges the pursuit of this mission by putting technology at the heart of these interactions. The team builds core platforms that leverage Machine Learning, to automatically discover customer and seller impacting frictions and eliminate them systematically. The RBS Tech team thrives on innovation, collaboration and talent growth.

Basic Qualifications

• 12+ years of IT industry experience
• BS or higher degree
• Experience designing, building and maintaining software systems of large scale and complexity
• Hands on experience with big data processing/storage, object-oriented design, usage of GenAI
• Experience in working with multiple cross functional, cross geography teams
• Experience of leading and mentoring senior engineers
• Proven track record of delivering high-quality software

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building web-scale systems and products
• Good understanding of Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Image/Video processing

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Experience Level

Senior Level