Software Development Manager, Contra

We are looking for a Software Development Manager to lead the engineering team (~10-12 SDEs) that owns the search, indexing, and data distribution platform powering every inventory management experience for Amazon's millions of Selling Partners. When a seller checks their inventory, downloads a report, or searches their catalog — they are using systems your team builds and operates.

You will own delivery, operational excellence, and technical direction for a platform that ingests 300K+ data changes per second from dozens of upstream sources, maintains hundreds of distributed search clusters, and serves 7K+ queries per second across 250+ internal and external clients. You will inherit an established team with a clear multi-year roadmap, significant operational surface area, and a high bar for availability in systems that directly affect seller revenue.

The ideal candidate thrives in ambiguous, high-scale environments and can drive cross-functional alignment across different organizations to deliver data interfaces that make it easy for sellers and the teams supporting them to manage and grow selection on Amazon.

You'll lead a diverse team of Senior, Intermediate, and Junior Software Development Engineers, partnering closely with Program and Product Management to define and execute strategic roadmaps. This is a role with both operational depth and strategic upside — you get to keep a critical system running while building the next generation of it.

Key job responsibilities

1. Drive technical vision and architecture, making strategic decisions that balance innovation with operational excellence across large-scale distributed search and data systems

2. Own end-to-end delivery — from planning through execution to metric-driven success measurement — for a platform serving millions of sellers across all Amazon marketplaces worldwide

3. Lead and grow a high-performing engineering team through effective hiring, mentoring, and career development while fostering an inclusive, collaborative environment

4. Manage operational health of a large-scale, multi-region infrastructure including monitoring, alerting, automation, and incident response

5. Drive cross-organizational alignment — balancing business requirements from product, partner, and experience teams against technical constraints and operational risk

6. Manage stakeholder communications and project visibility across organizations, translating technical complexity into business-relevant updates

7. Establish technical best practices and drive continuous improvement through distributed systems design, AI-powered automation, and developer productivity tooling

8. Reduce operational toil through mechanisms — building self-healing systems, automation, and tooling rather than scaling human effort linearly with system growth

About the team

This team owns the system and services that enables Selling Partners and internal Amazon teams to discover, search, and retrieve listing data at scale. The platform ingests diverse data from authoritative sources across Amazon, aggregates them into unified searchable documents, indexes them across hundreds of distributed clusters, and provides read access through APIs and bulk reports. It powers the inventory management page that every Amazon seller uses daily, the programmatic interfaces that thousands of integrators build against, and the data exports that sellers rely on for business operations.

The team handles extreme scale (300K+ source changes ingested per second, hundreds of search clusters, 7K+ TPS serving 250+ client teams) with strict availability requirements — when this platform is down, sellers cannot see or manage their inventory. The team operates across multiple AWS regions and manages the full lifecycle from data ingestion through indexing, query serving, and report generation.

Basic Qualifications

• 3+ years of engineering team management experience
• 7+ years of working directly within engineering teams experience
• 3+ years of designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
• 8+ years of leading the definition and development of multi tier web 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

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

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, AZ, Tempe - 184,900.00 - 250,200.00 USD annually