Software Development Engineer, Amazon Q

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 questionscombining generative AI with AWS context retrieval tools and actions to help customers understand their environments and get work done faster.

Building these experiences creates challenging engineering problems. How do you ground an LLMs response in relevant and up-to-date information from a customers AWS environment while maintaining strong security boundaries and low latency How do you build agentic experiences that can reason retrieve information invoke tools and take actions reliably and safely How do you measure and improve the quality of AI-powered experiences when traditional software testing alone is not enough

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

In this role you will own meaningful features and components from design through production. You will work closely with other engineers product managers applied scientists UX partners and teams across AWS to translate customer needs into scalable technical solutions. You will contribute to architectural decisions implement production-quality software and continuously improve the reliability performance and quality of the systems you own.

This is an opportunity to work on emerging generative AI technologies while solving real distributed-systems problems at AWS scale.



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

Build: Design implement test and launch customer-facing Amazon Q capabilities and the backend services that power them. Build systems that connect foundation models with AWS knowledge customer context retrieval systems APIs tools and actions.

Solve: Work independently on complex engineering problems involving generative AI distributed systems contextual grounding retrieval tool execution agentic workflows latency reliability and security.

Own: Take ownership of features and services throughout their lifecyclefrom requirements and technical design through implementation deployment operations troubleshooting and continuous improvement.

Design: Contribute to system architecture and technical designs evaluate engineering trade-offs participate in design reviews and help build solutions that are scalable maintainable secure and cost effective.

Operate: Build reliable production systems with strong engineering practices around testing observability monitoring deployment operational readiness and incident response. Use operational and customer signals to identify and address opportunities for improvement.

Collaborate and innovate: Work closely with engineers applied scientists product managers and partner teams to bring advances in foundation models retrieval reasoning and agentic AI into production. Participate in code reviews share technical knowledge and help raise the engineering quality of the team.

A day in the life
Youll start the day with the signals from how Amazon Q performed yesterday satisfaction trends latency tails eval results and pick up the problem that matters most. Mornings might be a design review with applied scientists on retrieval or agent orchestration; afternoons writing the service code that ships it. Youll partner with PMs TPMs and AWS service teams onboarding their own capabilities into the assistant and youll own what you build in production. Expect to move between deep distributed-systems work prompt and evaluation iteration and A/B experiments that tell you whether your change actually helped a customer.

About the team
Were the team behind Amazon Q in the AWS Management Console engineers applied scientists and product managers working in one loop rather than in handoffs. Our mission is simple to say and hard to do: make the assistant genuinely useful to anyone operating on AWS. We ship fast measure honestly and say so when the data doesnt support the idea we liked. Because the field moves monthly we expect to rewrite our own assumptions often and wed rather learn from a real experiment than argue in a doc. We care about operational excellence and about each others time.

- 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
- Bachelors degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science Engineering Mathematics or a related field
- Experience programming with at least one software programming language

- 3 years of full software development life cycle including coding standards code reviews source control management build processes testing and operations experience
- Bachelors 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 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 VA Arlington - 143700.00 - 194400.00 USD annually