Software Development Manager III, Relay Yard Automation, Relay Yard Automation

Amazon moves millions of packages daily through a global logistics network of Fulfillment Centers Sort Centers and Delivery Stations. Every facility has a trailer yard the physical space where line-haul vehicles arrive get loaded or unloaded and depart. Tracking whats happening in these yards in real time (which trailers are where what state theyre in whos arriving and departing) is a hard problem that sits at the intersection of physical operations and software systems. The Relay Yard Automation (RYA) team builds the software that manages these trailer yards across 6000 Amazon facilities on three continents. Our products handle 200K gate transactions per day and facilitated the arrival and departure of 55M vehicles last year. We integrate computer vision RFID GPS ultrasonic sensors and IoT edge devices to automate what were historically manual associate-staffed processes from gate check-in/check-out to in-yard trailer movements. Our gate automation program has already eliminated millions of manual transactions with a long-term goal of fully autonomous yard operations. The tech stack is diverse by necessity: Android mobile apps for yard associates and drivers React web applications for remote gate agents and yard operators Java/TypeScript backend services on AWS and hardware integrations running on edge compute devices deployed in the field. Systems are loosely coupled event-driven and must operate reliably in environments ranging from 1M sq ft North American fulfillment centers to small urban European delivery stations.

As the SDM for this team you will lead 6 SDEs and own the end-to-end delivery of RYAs product roadmap. You will partner with product managers operations leaders and peer engineering teams across Transportation Technology to define what to build next and ensure your team ships it. The role requires someone comfortable operating across the full stack making architectural trade-off decisions with senior engineers and translating ambiguous operational problems into scoped technical plans. You will own your teams operational health for tier-1 services that directly impact driver experience and Amazons ability to meet customer delivery promises.


Key job responsibilities
- Own delivery of your teams roadmap: define milestones allocate resources across 6 SDEs track execution and course-correct when plans slip.
- Hire develop and retain your team. Write performance evaluations calibrate talent and create growth plans that move each engineer toward their next level.
- Translate ambiguous business problems into scoped technical strategies with product and principal engineering partners. Decompose large initiatives into parallel workstreams.
- Make architectural trade-off decisions alongside your senior engineers balancing delivery speed technical debt and long-term extensibility. You wont write production code daily but you must understand the systems well enough to challenge designs and unblock decisions.
- Own operational health: availability latency alarming on-call response and post-incident corrective actions.
- Remove cross-team blockers. Influence peer teams and dependencies to align on shared timelines without positional authority.
- Represent your team in leadership reviews (OP1/OP2 business reviews). Write data-driven narratives that surface risks early and propose decisions.
- Build mechanisms that outlast individuals: runbooks onboarding docs deployment automation and review processes that raise the teams baseline.

- 3 years of engineering team management experience
- 7 years of engineering experience
- 8 years of leading the definition and development of multi tier web services experience
- Knowledge of engineering practices and patterns for the full software/hardware/networks development life cycle including coding standards code reviews source control management build processes testing certification and livesite operations
- Experience partnering with product or program management teams
- Experience designing or architecting (design patterns reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems

- Experience in communicating with users other technical teams and senior leadership to collect requirements describe software product features technical designs and product strategy
- Experience in recruiting hiring mentoring/coaching and managing teams of Software Engineers to improve their skills and make them more effective product software engineers

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