{"id":2784534,"url":"https://alion.io/job/amazon-principal-software-engineer-alexa-ai-aurora","title":"Principal Software Engineer, Alexa AI (AURORA)","company":{"id":19,"name":"Amazon","domain":"amazon.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/amazon","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Career site","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":83,"open_postings":4168,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.883,"repost_share":0.001,"time_to_fill_p50_days":16,"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Bengaluru, India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":30000,"max_usd":68000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":57},"experience_years_min":15,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon Aurora","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-01-21T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-17","last_verified_at":"2026-10-19T14:01:07Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":271,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":271},"description":"Interested in building Amazon Alexa, Machine Learning, and Generative Artificial Intelligence? We're building products and services that power state of the art for Amazon customers. Come join us!\nThe Alexa AI org is looking for a Principal Engineer to join Aurora (Alexa Understanding, Runtime, ORchestration, and Applied Sciences) - Alexa's AI runtime backbone and horizontal intelligence organization. Aurora is a science and engineering organization that advances research while delivering robust, scalable runtime solutions. We revolutionize conversational AI through three core pillars: architecting mission-critical AI runtime systems, advancing science solutions that connect key conversational capabilities, and transforming how builders create at scale.\nThis role sits at the intersection of latest AI research and large-scale production systems, where you will architect and deliver Pragmatic AI capabilities - AI that is not just technically impressive, but reliably useful, trustworthy, and accessible to real customers in their everyday lives.\nWhat makes this role unique\nYou will be building AI experiences that work across the full spectrum of human interaction - multi-modal (speech, text, image, video), multi-lingual (global locales with distinct linguistic and cultural requirements), and multi-model (orchestrating and routing across frontier and specialized AI models to optimize for accuracy, latency, and cost). Your systems will serve customers across a diverse range of endpoints and form factors, from voice-first devices to screen-based and mobile experiences.\nAURORA influences the full Alexa+ agent execution path - from reasoning to evaluation to runtime - enabling you to operate in a structure designed to simplify interactions between components and the people who build them, accelerate feature development, and raise the bar on both operations and innovation velocity.\nInfrastructure & Systems Complexity\nDesign and own the architecture for AI capability routing and orchestration at massive scale, including intelligent query classification, model selection, and fallback strategies across heterogeneous AI back-ends\nDrive latency optimization across globally distributed inference pipelines, including model serving infrastructure, caching strategies, and real-time performance monitoring to meet strict customer-facing SLAs\nBuild evaluation and quality assurance infrastructure - including offline test sets, live traffic sampling, model and prompt release gating, and automated regression frameworks - to maintain high accuracy and reliability as models and locales evolve\nArchitect systems that support rapid iteration and safe deployment of new AI capabilities across global regions, with robust rollback, experimentation, and observability tooling\nLead the design of core AI runtime platforms that power conversational experiences end-to-end, including speech processing, intent orchestration, and unconstrained interaction models that move beyond rigid turn-taking structures Technology Vision\nDefine the long-term technical strategy for how Alexa+ delivers high-quality, low-latency AI experiences to a global customer base, including the evolution of model integration patterns as the AI landscape rapidly changes\nShape AURORA’s platform vision to empower internal and external engineers and scientists worldwide with modular, reusable platforms that accelerate innovation - while delivering accurate, responsive, and reliable conversational experiences to millions of end-users through operational excellence at scale\nEstablish engineering standards and best practices for responsible AI deployment - ensuring accuracy, safety, and fairness are first-class properties of every capability shipped\nInfluence the broader Alexa AI platform roadmap by identifying capability gaps, proposing architectural investments, and partnering with applied science, product, and platform teams to close them\nDrive science-to-production integration for specialized conversational AI capabilities, including reasoning, classification, and language understanding models What we're looking for\nDeep expertise in distributed systems, ML inference infrastructure, or large-scale AI platform engineering\nDemonstrated ability to define technical direction in ambiguous, high-stakes problem spaces with significant customer and business impact\nExperience driving cross-functional alignment across science, engineering, and product organizations - particularly in environments where unified ownership across research, runtime, and evaluation accelerates delivery\nA track record of delivering production AI systems that serve diverse, global customer populations\nPassion for building AI that is genuinely useful and trustworthy for real people Key job responsibilities Key job responsibilities\nLead the org's technical direction, making critical decisions on architecture, infrastructure, and systems design for optimal performance, scalability, resilience and access patterns.\nDrive innovation in architectures with GenAI models\nDesign and implement scalable solutions to org's technical initiatives\nArchitect and build large-scale, distributed systems that integrate complex datasets and support different access patterns.\nMentor and inspire a team of skilled engineers and scientists, fostering technical and professional growth\nCollaborate across Amazon to align technical vision and priorities, influencing decisions at senior levels.\nDefine best practices for system architecture and engineering processes, maintaining high standards for software quality and operational excellence\nLead engineering efforts that directly enhance customer experiences and business outcomes through Alexa+ and GenAI powered services. About the team The AURORA (Alexa Understanding, Runtime, ORchestration, and Applied Sciences) org is part of Alexa AI VP and Devices and Services SVP organization. AURORA is Alexa's AI runtime backbone and horizontal intelligence organization - a science and engineering organization that advances research while delivering robust, scalable runtime solutions. Our vision is to revolutionize conversational AI through three core pillars: architecting mission-critical AI runtime systems, advancing science solutions that connect key conversational capabilities, and transforming how builders create at scale. We are the horizontal Science and Engineering team that empowers Domains and Horizontal CX owners with transformative solutions that enable rapid, efficient scaling. AURORA represents a sophisticated global organization that spans multiple international locations including the US (Boston, Seattle), Canada, Poland, and India. The team's core mission is to deliver Pragmatic AI capabilities - AI that is not just technically impressive, but reliably useful, trustworthy, and accessible to real customers in their everyday lives - by developing and maintaining AI runtime systems and services that enhance the performance of core LLM models across various endpoints, modalities, and locales.\nBasic qualifications\n12+ years of non-internship professional software development experience\n8+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience\nExperience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team\nExperience collaborating across multiple organizations and influencing key outcomes.\nExperience as a technical leader of multiple concurrent projects, driving strategic technical decisions.\nPreferred qualifications\nExperience designing, building & operating large scale, highly available, secure cloud infrastructure.\nExperience with AI software systems including Agents.\n15+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience\n10+ years of highly scalable systems experience 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8367,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":15,"management_years_min":8,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Robotics AI","Advertising","Logistics","Logistics & Warehouse Robotics"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-17T13:46:31Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":5,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.176,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":271,"expected_fill_days":16,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/amazon-principal-software-engineer-alexa-ai-aurora","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/amazon-principal-software-engineer-alexa-ai-aurora.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-19T15:21:13Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":11312,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-20T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":19},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=19"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Famazon-principal-software-engineer-alexa-ai-aurora"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Famazon-principal-software-engineer-alexa-ai-aurora"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Famazon-principal-software-engineer-alexa-ai-aurora"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/amazon-principal-software-engineer-alexa-ai-aurora\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Famazon-principal-software-engineer-alexa-ai-aurora"}]}