Amazon Looking for Software Development Engineer, Alexa Shopping at Sunnyvale, CA Full Time

Job summary
Have you ever asked Alexa questions such as “how long does iphone 12 stay powered on after charging” or “can dogs eat carrots” (yes they can)? Were you happy with what Alexa answered or did you think Alexa could do a better job? While these questions seem straightforward for humans, they are extremely challenging for an AI device like Alexa to understand. Not to mention the various languages and accents that make the problem even more challenging. Even if Alexa understands these questions, she needs to find the best answer for the customer and needs to decide what to do when she does not have the answer.

Our team works to build mechanism to get answers from the Amazon community where none existed. The role is to build this trail blazing feature to be able to complete a customers request for information even if we failed at the first attempt. We think big, and any mechanism to go and search for a answer can be expanded to multiple use cases and knowledge sources, to bring the best experience for Alexa product answering. We are building various deep learning models to achieve the above goals. We also have a front end experience to enable customer to also search for the answers in our community. With a mix of back end, science models and UX experience in the team, it provides a full stack experience for you to user your creativity to build an ‘Amazon’ experience!

What is our scale: Alexa serves millions of customers around the world, and hence we too have the opportunity to help our customer find better insights and answers to the product questions they have.

What can you learn: You can learn how to build, deploy and maintain machine learning models. You can build direct customer experiences and services to enable new intelligent features for customer. You have the opportunity to dive into the big data to understand customers. You can collaborate with data scientists on the team to experiment building new models. With a mix of data and software engineering problems, you can choose your learning path.

Key job responsibilities
Design and development of new software. Build scalable, stable and maintainable solutions for customer.

Analyze and prototype new experiences for customers.

Maintain and develop existing solutions.

Support the team in code reviews, design reviews and other development activities.

A day in the life
Your everyday will involve a mix of tasks from designing new software, writing code for new features, fixing bugs on existing features, looking at customer experience and finding ways to improve the same, coordinating with team on various efforts. We also have some regular team sprint activities which you will also participate in. And yes, celebrate the milestones with the team from time to time!

We are a team that values opinion, innovation and work-life balance. Choose the area you want to work on and we can discuss on how you can make the most impact in it. You own innovating for the team and with the team! If you have an idea that can improve the team goals or can be helpful to our customers, this is the place you can freely work on it and make an impact. With no-meeting Thursdays and Monday coffee chats, we make sure that our team gets enough focus time and time to know each other.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• 1+ years of experience contributing to the system design or architecture (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems.
• 2+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• Programming experience with at least one software programming language.

• Bachelor or Master’s degree in highly quantitative field (CS, machine learning, mathematics, statistics) or equivalent experience.
• Experience applying various machine learning techniques, and understanding the key parameters that affect their performance.
• Experience developing experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, and the ability to accurately determine cause and effect relationships.
• Have a history of building systems that capture and utilize large data sets in order to quantify performance via metrics or KPIs.
• Understanding of relevant statistical measures such as confidence intervals, significance of error measurements, development and evaluation data sets, etc.* Experienced in using multiple data science methodologies to solve complex business problems.
• Experienced in handling large data sets using SQL and databases in a business environment.
• Excellent verbal and written communication.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem solving skills.
• Thrive in a fast-paced, innovative environment.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

Master’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Experience taking a leading role in building complex software systems that have been successfully delivered to customers

Knowledge of professional software engineering practices & best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations

Experience communicating with users, other technical teams, and senior management to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical designs, and product strategy

Experience mentoring junior software engineers to improve their skills and make them more effective product software engineers

Demonstrable track record of success in delivering new features and products.

Demonstrated leadership abilities in an engineering environment in driving operational excellence and best practices.

Highly quantitative with great judgment and passion for building a great customer experience.

Amazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.