The posting
You will own major features and services across two connected products that deliver specialist expertise to the AWS field:
- AWS Specialist Agent (ASA) – A production multi-agent system that gives field teams deep technical expertise across all AWS domains on demand. ASA is available in SpecReq, AskAWSentral, Pathfinder, Slack, Kiro, and any MCP or A2A client. It answers routine technical questions directly and escalates complex (L300+) challenges to human specialists with a pre-researched solution packet, so specialists spend their time on the highest-value customer problems.
- Specialist Knowledge Vault (KV) – An AI-first knowledge service that uses purpose-built crawlers to index specialist content from Highspot, YouTube, Broadcast, GitHub, Workshop Studio, Alchemy, and more, which removes manual consolidation. KV lets 46 Technical Field Communities (TFCs) endorse golden content, add agent steering, build reusable playbooks, and flag outdated or incorrect content, so the agent answers with the specialist point of view built in.
This is an AI-first engineering role. As an SDE II, you will design, build, and operate significant parts of the platform on your own. You will solve hard problems in retrieval-augmented generation, multi-agent orchestration, and LLM evaluation at AWS scale, using the AI services AWS builds for its customers. You will also help raise the engineering bar for the team.
Key job responsibilities - Design, build, and scale Knowledge Vault crawlers and ingestion pipelines that bring specialist content from internal and external sources into the vault reliably and at low cost. Make clear trade-offs on freshness, cost, and quality.
- Lead embedding, retrieval, and ranking improvements end to end, from hypothesis and experiment design through evaluation and production rollout. Measure each change against agreed quality metrics.
- Build and maintain evaluation test sets, prompts, and guardrails. Use evaluation results to decide what ships, and help define the quality bar for agent responses.
- Design APIs and MCP/A2A integrations as clean, reusable interfaces that bring ASA and KV into the tools where field teams already work.
- Drive operational excellence for the services you own: define monitoring and alarming, lead incident response during on-call, fix root causes, and run COE and metrics reviews. Leave the software easier to maintain than you found it.
- Work with Product Management, Applied Science, and TFC stakeholders to turn ambiguous field problems into well-scoped projects. Balance customer needs with team priorities.
- Raise the team's bar through thorough code reviews and design reviews. Mentor and onboard SDE Is and new team members, and take part in recruiting and interviewing.
A day in the life You start the day with a standup, where you share progress, flag risks, and unblock teammates. You spend a focused block building a new retrieval or agent capability that you designed, then review a teammate's code and give feedback that helps them grow. You might set up an evaluation run to confirm that a ranking change improves answer quality before you roll it out, or meet with a product manager and a TFC lead to scope a new field request into a set of tasks. Later you walk the team through your design doc and work through the open trade-offs. On your on-call weeks, you handle alarms, lead the fix for the root cause, and turn what you learn into operational improvements.
About the team We are engineers, applied scientists, and product managers. Engineers own their services from design through on-call. SDE IIs act as technical owners of major components and help senior engineers set the team's technical direction.
Our tenets:
- Meet customers where they work. - Help specialists do more, not replace them. - Build every integration as a clean API.
About AWS Diverse Experiences AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.
Why AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses.
Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness.
Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.
Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud.
- 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 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 - Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
- 3+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience - Bachelor's 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 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, NJ, Jersey City - 158,100.00 - 213,800.00 USD annually USA, NY, New York - 158,100.00 - 213,800.00 USD annually
