The role
From Amazon's own posting.
Want to make the Earth's largest product catalog of billions of items, available in any language, all over the world, all the time, in milliseconds, millions of times per second?
The catalog team is looking for a highly technical, AI-native leader who wants to be at the absolute frontier of applied AI and ship it at planetary scale. You and your team of engineers will take a well-established catalog orchestration platform and reinvent it as an AI-first system, one where LLMs and autonomous agents own ever-larger parts of the loop to enrich, validate, and self-heal the catalog in real time. You'll pioneer agentic workflows, model-driven orchestration, and human-in-the-loop guardrails to tackle some of the hardest architectural problems in the industry: reliability, latency, and trust at Amazon's scale. This is a rare opportunity to set the technical strategy for how AI reshapes commerce itself. You'll power Amazon's expansion into new countries, languages, physical stores, and product lines, and define what the catalog becomes in an agent-driven world.
Your breadth of impact will range from how sellers and vendors list their products with Amazon's catalog, to how products move through Amazon's fulfillment centers and to how our shopping customers find and discover the products they love!
As an SDM, you are empowered to:
- Own the technical vision, strategy, planning, and prioritization for evolving the catalog orchestration platform — driving architectural decisions and end-to-end delivery as the system adapts to new classes of workloads.
- Identify, assess, and mitigate risks — provide escalation management, anticipate tradeoffs, and balance business needs against technical constraints.
- Create, maintain, and disseminate project information to stakeholders; drive alignment across engineering, science, and product teams.
- Manage and grow a team of talented engineers — making great hiring decisions, setting goals, providing feedback, and managing performance.
- Develop best practices to build and operate critical catalog platform services that handle both traditional low-latency workloads and ML-powered processing at scale.
- 3+ years of engineering team management experience
- 7+ years of working directly within engineering teams experience
- 3+ years of designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems 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 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
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
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, CA, Sunnyvale - 212,700.00 - 287,700.00 USD annually