Software Development Engineer II, Relay Yard Automation, Relay Yard Automation

Amazon moves millions of packages daily through a global logistics network of Fulfillment Centers, Sort Centers, and Delivery Stations. Every facility has a trailer yard - the physical space where line-haul vehicles arrive, get loaded or unloaded, and depart. Tracking what's happening in these yards in real time (which trailers are where, what state they're in, who's arriving and departing) is a hard problem that sits at the intersection of physical operations and software systems.

The Relay Yard Automation (RYA) team builds the software that manages these trailer yards across 6,000+ Amazon facilities on three continents. Our products handle 200K+ gate transactions

per day and facilitated the arrival and departure of 55M vehicles last year. We integrate computer vision, RFID, GPS, ultrasonic sensors, and IoT edge devices to automate what were historically manual, associate-staffed processes, from gate check-in/check-out to in-yard trailer movements. Our gate automation program has already eliminated millions of manual transactions, with a long-term goal of fully autonomous yard operations.

The tech stack is diverse by necessity: Android mobile apps for yard associates and drivers, React web applications for remote gate agents and yard operators, Java/TypeScript backend services on AWS, and hardware integrations running on edge compute devices deployed in the field. Systems are loosely coupled, event-driven, and must operate reliably in environments ranging from 1M+ sq ft North American fulfillment centers to small urban European delivery stations.

As an SDE on this team, you will design and build features and services that power yard automation across Amazon's logistics network. You will write high-quality code across the full stack, contribute to system design discussions, and deliver projects from technical design through production launch. The role involves working across backend services, web and mobile applications, and integrations with physical sensor systems at the edge. You will make thoughtful engineering trade-offs, participate in design and code reviews, and contribute to the team's operational excellence practices - supporting tier-1 systems where your work directly impacts driver experience and Amazon's ability to meet customer delivery promises.

Key job responsibilities

- Design and implement software for yard and gate automation products across tier-1 systems. Your code runs in production where defects directly impact driver experience and customer delivery promises.

- Lead large projects end-to-end: define the technical approach in ambiguous problem spaces, decompose work into parallel workstreams, and deliver cohesive launches.

- Own system architecture for your team's services. Proactively simplify code, resolve architecture deficiencies, and remove bottlenecks across Java backend services, TypeScript/React web apps, Android mobile apps, and IoT edge devices.

- Make short-term vs. long-term trade-off decisions and communicate them clearly to your team and stakeholders.

- Integrate with physical systems - RFID readers, computer vision cameras, ultrasonic sensors, GPS - running on edge compute in variable warehouse environments. Debug problems that span hardware and cloud software.

- Own operational excellence for services you build: monitoring, alarming, runbooks, incident response, and root-cause corrective actions.

- Influence technical direction beyond your team through design reviews with partner teams across Transportation Technology.

- Act as a force multiplier. Raise the engineering bar through code reviews, design artifacts, and reusable frameworks. Mentor junior engineers toward their next level.

Basic qualifications

- 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

- 3+ years of Video Games Industry (supporting title Development, Release, or Live Ops) experience

- Experience programming with at least one software programming language

Preferred qualifications

- 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

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