Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses, responsible for defining and delivering a collection of advertising solutions that drive product discovery and sales. We deliver billions of ad impressions every single day on behalf of our advertisers and generate massive volumes of data across the advertising lifecycle.
Analytics & Insights owns delivering Spektr, an "always-on analytics" platform for Ads that is fully scalable and reliable. We are building SpektrBot, a conversational AI assistant that empowers data engineers, analysts, and business stakeholders to interact with our vast advertising data lake through natural language. Using state-of-the-art generative AI, SpektrBot translates natural language queries into accurate, trusted data retrievals, eliminating the friction between questions and answers. Our products are strategically important to leadership, finance, economists, analysts, machine learning scientists, SDEs, and BI partners across 7 VP organizations to drive long-term growth.
As a Software Development Manager, you will lead a team of software engineers building the platform that powers SpektrBot's conversational AI experience. You will ship core products including query orchestration services, RAG pipelines, multi-agent architectures, SQL generation systems, and automated evaluation frameworks. Your team will build reliable integrations with large language models, engineer feedback loops for continuous improvement, and scale the platform from 4K to 20K monthly queries across 15+ advertising domains. You will coordinate with Applied Scientists, Data Engineers, Product Managers, and partner teams across 7 VP organizations to deliver on our SVP goal. You will simplify the interfaces so that non-technical users across Amazon Advertising can get data insights through natural conversation.
Specific skills we are looking for:
- Ability to get a lot done in a startup environment with a mix of ambiguity and opportunity
- Willingness to roll up your sleeves and do whatever is necessary, with a general manager / owner mentality and an entrepreneurial drive
- Player-coach mentality, willing to ship code alongside your team when needed to unblock delivery or set technical direction
- Experience managing engineers building production ML/AI systems, ideally in GenAI, LLM, or conversational AI domains
- Track record of coordinating across multiple partner teams and VP organizations to deliver complex technical programs
- Ability to drive engineering excellence including code standards, automated testing, and operational best practices across a growing team
- Ability to earn trust across different levels and multiple groups of a large organization
- Ability to have fun and inspire team members to enjoy work, be action-oriented, and stretch their imagination
- Strong oral and written communication skills, ability to run effective roadshows and evangelize products to stakeholders
- Sound business judgment, proven ability to influence others, and strong analytical thinking skills
- Ability to think strategically and act tactically, managing parallel workstreams without losing sight of the big picture
Key job responsibilities
- Manage and grow a team of 6+ software development engineers building SpektrBot's conversational AI platform
- Drive engineering execution across parallel workstreams including accuracy improvement, latency reduction, domain expansion, and partner integrations
- Coordinate with 15+ partner teams across 7 VP organizations (DemandTech, MADS, Ads Support, AMC, Sales, Finance, APM-A) to onboard datasets and deliver integrations
- Own engineering excellence including code standards, architecture reviews, automated testing (1000+ questions across 20+ business domains), and operational readiness
- Lead roadshows and GTM activities to drive SpektrBot adoption across Ads, onboarding new customer teams and evangelizing capabilities to stakeholders
- Organize and run sprint planning across multiple concurrent technical workstreams, unblocking engineers and ensuring delivery velocity
- Partner with Applied Scientists (peer) and Data Engineers to align on technical direction for RAG architectures, embedding pipelines, and SQL generation systems
- Own operational excellence for production systems serving thousands of internal customers, including on-call, monitoring, alarming, and incident response
- Hire, develop, and retain top engineering talent while building a collaborative and high-ownership team culture
A day in the life
You might start the day in a sprint planning session, reprioritizing work across your accuracy and latency workstreams based on new partner requirements from AMC. Mid-morning you run a 1:1 with an engineer who is ramping on a new domain integration, unblocking a technical design decision. After lunch, you join a roadshow with the ADSP Finance team to demo SpektrBot capabilities and align on their dataset onboarding timeline. Later, you review a design doc for the multi-agent orchestration architecture, providing feedback on error handling and fallback behavior. You end the day reviewing your team's operational dashboard, checking on-call health and flagging a latency regression for tomorrow's standup. Every day brings different challenges, but the thread is always enabling your engineers to build AI-powered systems that are accurate, reliable, and delightful to use.
About the team
We have a small scrappy team carved out from a larger Ads-wide data lake team. We are swimming in petabytes of data that we help the organization make sense of. Our team's mission is to help anyone in the Ads org find the data they need using only natural language. You will manage the SDE team alongside peer Applied Scientists, Data Scientists, and Data Engineers in a collaborative environment that iterates quickly and shares in each others' successes. We are highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving with an entrepreneurial spirit and bias for action. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we are growing at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities.
- 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.
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, WA, SEATTLE - 184,900.00 - 250,200.00 USD annually
