Senior Software Development Engineer, Amazon Rufus

Rufus is a generative AI-powered shopping assistant in the Amazon Shopping app designed to help answer a variety of shopping-related questions. Rufus makes it easy for customers to find and discover the best products to meet their needs by helping with product research, providing comparisons and recommendations, answering specific product questions, and more.

The Retrieval Engineering team is a critical component of the Rufus infrastructure, responsible for building and scaling the systems that power information retrieval, search relevance, and data access patterns that enable Rufus to deliver accurate, contextual responses to millions of customers worldwide.

We are searching for a Senior Software Development Engineer who is passionate about technology, innovation, and customer experience to join the Retrieval Engineering team within Rufus.

If you are thrilled about creating customer experiences that will be used by millions of people worldwide and are eager to tackle technical challenges that have never been addressed before, then this is the perfect opportunity for you.

Key job responsibilities

As a Senior Software Development Engineer in this role, you are a recognized technical leader who drives the engineering strategy, mentors team members, and partners with cross-functional teams to deliver complex end-to-end retrieval solutions. Your work focuses on architecting and implementing robust systems in ambiguous problem areas where both the business problem and solution approach need to be defined.

You will:

• Lead the technical vision and innovation for retrieval systems that power AI-driven shopping experiences on Amazon Rufus
• Design and build scalable, high-performance retrieval infrastructure that serves millions of customers with fast, reliable, and secure responses
• Own features end-to-end, from conception through design, implementation, and production deployment
• Collaborate with experienced cross-disciplinary Amazonians including Applied Scientists, Software Engineers, and Product Managers to conceive, design, and bring innovative solutions
• Improve latency, quality, and relevance metrics in partnership with science and engineering teams across Rufus
• Build LLM-based retrieval workflows and content generation pipelines
• Partner with Applied Scientists to perform prompt tuning, retrieval evaluations, and relevance assessments
• Design and code the right solutions starting with broadly defined problems, bringing deep expertise to provide context for current and future technology choices
• Take ownership of the long-term technical vision, product roadmaps, and technologies, defining how systems should evolve
• Build consensus through thoughtful discussions with stakeholders, scientists, and engineering peers across multiple teams
• Work in an agile environment to deliver high-quality software with a focus on operational excellence
• Mentor and grow junior developers, encourage software development best practices, and iterate quickly
• Play an active role in building quick prototypes or proofs of concept in partnership with other technology leaders within the team
• Tackle challenging, novel situations every day and have the opportunity to work with multiple technical teams at Amazon

A day in the life

The challenges Senior SDEs solve for at Amazon are big and influence millions of customers, sellers, and products around the world. We are looking for individuals who are passionate about creating new products, features, and services from scratch while managing ambiguity and the pace of a company where development cycles are measured in weeks, not years. Along the way, you"ll learn a lot, have fun, and make a positive impact on millions of people.

About the team

You will be an integral part of a passionate and creative team that encourages experimentation and innovation on behalf of our customers. The Retrieval Engineering team works at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, information retrieval, and generative AI, building the foundational infrastructure that enables Rufus to understand customer intent and deliver relevant, accurate responses at scale.