Software Development Engineer, Humorphic Labs

As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, we have a vision to provide business applications, leveraging Amazon's unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers' businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use.

Humorphic Labs builds AI systems that work as teammates rather than tools, and ships them six months or more ahead of anyone else. The Lab is small on purpose, so it can change direction in a day.

Humorphism is the quality of the working relationship between a person and an AI system. It asks whether the system acts proactively, adapts to the person and the situation, earns trust, manages attention, and strengthens human judgment. The work is closing the distance between a tool a person operates and a teammate a person collaborates with.

You will start in the Lab and build a capability that does not exist yet. Then you will deploy into the Applied AI Solutions product team that carries it, and stay until that product ships it and customers use it. Adoption is yours. Over time the same pattern extends to AWS service teams.

The Lab does not run production at scale. Once a capability proves itself, architecture and scaling move to the product team, and you return with what you learned.

There is no fixed technology stack. The work leans toward the web frontend, because a teammate is judged on the surface where a person meets it, and extends to native mobile, voice, and other modalities as the problem demands. Some of these problems have no known solution today. Multimodality is one.

The Lab is a lead who still writes code, an Applied Scientist, and engineers. Applied AI Solutions leadership approved it with one instruction - to explore the limits of what we can build - and one number: to ship six or more months ahead of what others can do.

The Applied Scientist owns the hypotheses and the evaluation. You build the systems that test them and the products that carry the ones that survive.

We have a sunset clause. Once a capability is proven and integrated into its product, the Lab moves to the next frontier.

Key job responsibilities

• Build AI teammate capabilities in the Lab, from a thesis to a working product, in line with the Humorphism design philosophy and with guidance from the Lab lead and the Applied Scientist.
• Implement the experiments the Applied Scientist designs, and turn research results into working software.
• Deploy into a product team, work alongside them, and drive your capability into their product.
• Own adoption of what you build. Measure it, report it, and stay until customers use it.
• Identify where the work breaks down in a host team"s hands, then correct the cause rather than the symptom.
• Partner with UX designers, product teams, and other organizations to deliver complete humorphic experiences.
• Transfer architecture and scaling to the product team at the agreed boundary, with the documentation and tests that make the transfer safe.
• Contribute your work back into the shared humorphic layer, so the next capability starts from a higher floor.
• Learn unfamiliar languages, runtimes, and problem domains as the work requires.
• Write tested code, review the code of others, and operate what the Lab runs.
• Present the work to the host team, the Lab, and SCORE, and participate in internal reviews.

A day in the life

Your calendar has two shapes.

In a Lab week you write code most of the day. You take a thesis about how a teammate should behave, build the smallest version that tests it, and put it in front of a person before the week ends. You sit with a UX designer to work out how the behavior should feel, not only what it does.

In a deployed week you sit with the product team carrying your capability. You watch a real user hit the seam between your work and theirs, and you fix it that afternoon. Expect occasional travel.

About the team

The Lab is a lead who still writes code, an Applied Scientist, and engineers. Applied AI Solutions leadership approved it with one instruction, to explore the limits of what we can build, and one number, to ship six or more months ahead of what others can do.

The Applied Scientist owns the hypotheses and the evaluation. You build the systems that test them and the products that carry the ones that survive.

We have a sunset clause. Once a capability is proven and integrated into its product, the Lab moves to the next frontier.