Principal Software Engineer, Amazon Customer Service

We are hiring a Principal Software Engineer to shape how Amazon Customer Service (CS) builds evolves and operates the technology behind every customer interaction.

If youve ever reached out to Amazon for issues with a delivery a return a Prime membership a streaming issue or a device problem (to name a few examples) youve touched our systems. Amazon Customer Service owns hundreds of services and systems that serve our customers using various offerings from across Stores Alexa Health Music Grocery Kindle and more. Behind those interactions sit thousands more services across the rest of Amazon that we connect to orchestrate depend on and influence.

This is one of the largest and most complex customer-facing technology organizations in the world. We own and build the foundational layers middle layers and application layers that serve customers with our AI-enabled customer-facing experiences and human-assisted channels. Our systems span dozens of business lines serve hundreds of millions of customers and handle billions of customer interactions.

Were looking for someone who can operate well across this wide-ranging landscape: setting technical direction driving critical architectural decisions that cut across partner teams and business lines and raising the engineering bar across the organization.
You will work at the intersection of system design AI and customer experience partnering with product science and research teams to define how we build the next generation of customer service technology.

What success looks like:
You establish a clear technical vision and architectural direction grounded in customer outcomes and developed in partnership with product science UX and customer experience research for how we build and evolve our technology across our various systems
Observability and measurement standards are adopted across major CS systems giving us consistent visibility into customer and business outcomes
Teams building AI-driven customer experiences actively use the design patterns instrumentation and evaluation standards you help establish including quality measurement escalation signals context handoffs and safety guardrails
Key architectural alignment efforts are underway driving service consolidation and reducing duplication where it improves customer outcomes and engineering velocity
Reusable patterns libraries and reference implementations gain broad adoption improving consistency and reducing time-to-build
Engineering product and science leaders across CS report improved clarity in technical direction and stronger alignment on how our systems evolve
Across the organization you become a trusted technical voice and role model for the Principal Engineering community influencing decisions beyond your direct scope


A day in the life
You start your morning reviewing a design document from a team building a new AI-powered customer resolution system. The design is solid but you notice the approach doesnt account for how the system will hand off context as the customer moves across channels from automated resolution to assisted support and back. You leave detailed feedback and sketch an alternative then schedule a working session to walk through it.

Mid-morning you join a cross-team architecture review where three teams have independently built similar capabilities for different business lines. You facilitate a discussion about what a shared approach could look like to find the right seams where standardization helps and where business-specific flexibility matters. You leave with a proposal to draft and a few engineers excited to prototype it.
Late morning you join a working session with a product manager and a CX researcher whove identified a pattern in customer escalations that doesnt match what the metrics are showing. You dig into the system behavior together trace the gap to a context-loss problem during channel transitions and sketch a technical approach that addresses the root cause not just the symptom. This is how the best solutions start here: customer-backwards not tech-backwards.

After lunch you carve out your daily two to three hours of hands-on coding time. Today youre building a reference implementation for a new instrumentation pattern that youve been advocating for something teams can pick up and adapt rather than starting from scratch. You push a working version and share it with the engineers wholl be the first adopters.

In the afternoon you meet with a science team working on a new model. You help them think through how to evaluate the models performance in production not just accuracy but how it affects the customers experience when the prediction is wrong. You connect them with the team that owns the escalation workflow so they can design the fallback path together.

You close the day in a 1:1 with an engineer whos working toward a Principal Engineer promotion. You review their recent design work push them on a few assumptions and help them see how to frame their technical contributions in terms of organizational impact.

15 years of professional software development experience
Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems or relevant experience with complex high-availability architectures
Demonstrated ability to drive adoption of technical standards and architectural direction across multiple teams without direct authority
Experience building operating or instrumenting AI/ML systems or relevant experience with systems that incorporate machine learning components
Strong hands-on engineering skills including the ability to design and build production systems
Bachelors degree in computer science engineering or related field or equivalent professional experience


Experience designing systems that combine deterministic workflows with AI/ML-driven decision-making
Experience with platform engineering service consolidation or large-scale architecture modernization
Experience working across organizational and job role boundaries to align architecture and engineering practices
Experience in customer service technology customer-facing systems or services with high-volume multimodal interaction
Track record of defining and scaling engineering standards across large organizations (100 engineers)
Experience with observability systems for distributed architectures including distributed tracing metrics and instrumentation at scale
Experience mentoring and developing senior engineers toward principal-level roles


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 for more information. If the country/region youre applying in isnt 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 WA Seattle - 200100.00 - 270600.00 USD annually