Software Development Manager, Traffic Marketing Tech - Search

Amazon's Stores Economics and Science organization is building the Internet's largest-scale Search Marketing systems worldwide. The team is responsible for a number of business-critical systems that generate, target, measure, and optimize hundreds of millions of search engine ad placements and organic search listings. We bring prospective customers who start their shopping journeys on search engines, and increasingly in AI assistants and agentic shopping experiences, to Amazon through our ML- and LLM-driven software and systems. We apply best-in-class digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to process and optimize billions of webpages, images, videos, and content snippets to improve Amazon's discoverability across both traditional search and AI-mediated discovery. We routinely solve challenges related to large-scale distributed services, applied science, big data systems, and web search. Cutting-edge technology is core to our business, from large language models, generative AI, and agentic systems to machine learning and large-scale optimization, and we build in an AI-native way, using AI tools and agents across the development lifecycle to raise our quality and velocity.

As a Software Development Manager on this team, you will lead a team of software development engineers building the technology behind tens of millions of daily search-engine shopping queries. You will own the technical direction and product roadmap for your area, partnering closely with product managers to define requirements and with peer engineering teams to unblock dependencies. With a strong research-and-development component to the work and multi-million dollar business impact, this role combines hands-on technical leadership with meaningful people management and career development.

Key job responsibilities

- Lead and grow a team of software development engineers, providing coaching, career development planning, and actionable feedback that raises the performance bar.

- Define and prioritize the team's product roadmap in partnership with product managers, translating customer and business needs into clear technical requirements and sprint plans.

- Own the operational health and quality of your team's services, establishing metrics and mechanisms that ensure reliability at scale.

- Collaborate across dependent teams to resolve blockers, align on priorities, and deliver cohesive solutions that serve shared business goals.

- Drive system design decisions and evaluate tradeoffs across scalability, maintainability, and performance, keeping your architecture simple and sustainable.

A day in the life

You start the morning reviewing operational dashboards and triaging any alerts before joining your team's standup. From there, you might spend time in a design review with your engineers, then shift to a roadmap planning session with your product manager to scope upcoming features. Afternoons often involve cross-team syncs to resolve dependencies and unblock your engineers, followed by a one-on-one where you discuss a team member's career goals. Throughout the day, you balance technical depth with people leadership, using AI-native tools and workflows that keep the team productive and learning.

About the team

The Search Marketing team within Stores Economics and Science builds the systems that connect shoppers on external search engines and AI assistants with the right products on Amazon. We operate at massive scale, processing billions of webpages and content assets through machine learning and optimization pipelines. Our work has a direct, measurable impact on how customers begin their shopping journeys.

We are an inclusive, collaborative group of engineers, scientists, and product managers who value curiosity and continuous improvement. Cross-team partnerships are central to how we operate, giving you broad influence and exposure to new technologies - including AI-native development workflows that keep the team at the forefront of modern software engineering.

Basic qualifications

- 3+ years of engineering team management experience

- 7+ years of engineering experience

- 3+ years of leading development of applications backed by AWS services or using other cloud based technologies and services experience

- Knowledge of engineering practices and patterns for the full software/hardware/networks development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, certification, and livesite operations

- Experience partnering with product or program management teams

- Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field

- Experience in written and verbal communication skills to communicate with technical and non-technical audiences, including senior leadership

Preferred qualifications

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

- Experience in recruiting, hiring, mentoring/coaching and managing teams of Software Engineers to improve their skills, and make them more effective, product software engineers

- Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field

- Experience in development of distributed/scalable systems and high-volume transaction applications

- Experience driving adoption of AI-native engineering workflows and ability to think critically about where AI tools and agents can meaningfully improve developer productivity, software quality, and operational efficiency.

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.