Senior Software Development Engineer, Music (Search)

DESCRIPTION

Job summary
About Amazon Music

Amazon Music reimagines music listening by enabling customers to unlock millions of songs, podcast episodes, and thousands of curated playlists and stations with their voice. Amazon Music provides unlimited access to new releases and classic hits across iOS and Android mobile devices, PC, Mac, Echo, and Alexa-enabled devices including Fire TV and more. With Amazon Music, Prime members have access to ad-free listening of 2 million songs at no additional cost to their membership. Listeners can also enjoy the premium subscription service, Amazon Music Unlimited, which provides access to more than 75 million songs and the latest new releases. Amazon Music Unlimited customers also now have access to the highest-quality listening experience available, with more than 75 million songs available in High Definition (HD), more than 7 million songs in Ultra HD, and a growing catalog of spatial audio. Customers also have free access to an ad-supported selection of top playlists and stations on Amazon Music. All Amazon Music tiers now offer a wide selection of podcasts at no additional cost, and live streaming in partnership with Twitch. Engaging with music and culture has never been more natural, simple, and fun. For more information, visit amazonmusic.com or download the Amazon Music app.

Do you have a passion for solving complex customer-facing problems in Search? Do you enjoy creating efficient, responsive Search systems that return highly personalized results, at scale? How about at Amazon scale? As a lead member of the Amazon Music Search team, you will be responsible for leading cross-team efforts to improve the ways that we serve personally relevant results when our customers find and experience music on our voice and visual clients (think Amazon Music Unlimited and Prime Music on Alexa, mobile apps, FireTV, Roku etc.)

The ideal candidate is one who is passionate about innovating for customers in a nimble team, and has a demonstrable track record of success in delivering new features and products. A commitment to work across teams, bias for action, and strong communication skills (to both business and technical partners) are absolute requirements. Creating reliable, scalable, and high performance systems requires exceptional technical expertise: a sound understanding of the fundamentals of Computer Science, and practical experience building large-scale distributed systems.

In this role, you will own the backend systems that generate the data, and also the serving systems that respond to customer queries.

What you will do:

• Work with other Search teams and stakeholders to define and implement system architecture.
• Develop new, modular, ultra-low-latency systems that improve the quality of search results, using AWS technologies like Kinesis, Glue, ElasticSearch, DynamoDB, Lambda etc.
• Innovate new technologies in automating robust, self-healing systems for data ingestion.
• Innovate techniques and create new systems to incorporate relevance signals in our systems.
• Innovate techniques to improve testability and reliability of our systems, like automated fault injection.
• Create systems to automate measurement and fixes to the quality of search results.
• Influence overall system architecture and mentor other developers in the team.
• Improve engineering and operational excellence best practices on the team.

• Have a meaningful impact on a product that touches the lives of millions of customers.
• Work with multiple sharp, talented tech and non-tech teams to build out the product with high velocity.
• Learn what “customer-obsessed” is all about.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• 4 years of professional software development experience
• 3 years of programming experience with at least one software programming language
• 2 years of experience contributing to the system design or architecture (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems
• Experience as a mentor, tech lead OR leading an engineering team

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or a related field
• 5 years of software development experience using Java or C
• Computer Science fundamentals in object-oriented design, data structures and algorithm design, and complexity analysis
• MS or PhD in a related technical field
• Experience building complex software systems that have been successfully delivered to customers
• Familiarity with machine learning concepts such as feature embeddings, nearest neighbor retrieval, and inference computation.
• Experience collaborating with machine learning scientists on cross organizational projects
• Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and management to collect requirements, describe software product features, and technical designs.
• Experience with AWS services (ElasticSearch, DynamoDB, S3 etc) highly desirable