Software Development Manager - Browse and Discovery Team Amazon
Seattle, WA

Job Description

Amazon Browse team enables customers' discovery experience by organizing Amazon's vast product selection into a Discovery Taxonomy. We obsess over helping customers all across the globe find, explore and discover products within the biggest and best selection on the planet through our Discovery Taxonomy, a graph structure that is comprised of nodes describing products (e.g., "Armchairs"), a logical grouping (e.g., "Furniture"), and departments (e.g., "Home & Garden"). Billions of products are assigned into the Discovery Taxonomy using ML and other classification algorithms. This organization is critical for Amazon to enable customers browse to their desired products in as few clicks as possible and find what they are looking for. It also enables active discovery (e.g., specific searches like "medium red silk shirt") and narrowing of product selection using refinement based filtering (e.g. color, size, etc.). The Taxonomy also provides customers access to products across merchandising dimensions thereby enabling a serendipitous discovery experience. E.g., (1) "Activity stores" (e.g., a "camping store" where customers can buy lanterns along with tents); or (2) "Seasonal Stores" (e.g., "Father's Day store").

As a software development manager with Browse Graph Platform team, you will not only build our next generation platform from scratch that will power Amazon Browse Experience at massive scale with high availability needs where conventional approaches won't work, but also drive future innovation and very interesting use cases in the navigational discovery space.

* How do we store and process data in a product taxonomy graph and forest structure with billions of records that continue to increase at an incredibly fast rate with even fewer computing resources?
* How do we keep raising the bar on the reach of our automated solutions to reduce/eliminate manual fixes to taxonomy and classification?
* How do we make sure that you always get relevant results when you search and filter for products on Amazon?
* How do we adapt appropriate algorithms from machine learning and information retrieval to solve customer-facing problems?

If you like to answer these questions and are excited about using cloud computing, information retrieval and machine learning to solve highly visible, fast evolving, ambiguous problems, then this position is for you. In this position you will directly manage a high caliber software development team and lead multiple critical initiatives. Responsibilities include strategic planning, driving application design, technical architecture and delivery. Successful candidates will be strong leaders who can establish relationships with business stakeholders, prioritize well, communicate clearly, and have a track record of leading high caliber tech teams to successfully deliver complex software products and solutions.

The candidate must show success in managing the careers of direct-reports, including making great hiring decisions, setting team and individual performance goals, tracking individual and team progress and performing yearly reviews. Candidates must also have an operational focus, experience in designing and evaluating system metrics, evaluating system performance, and scaling systems.

Professional traits that are not unique to this position, but necessary for Amazon leaders:

* Exhibits excellent judgment
* Hires and develops great people
* Has relentlessly high standards (is never satisfied with the status quo)
* Is able to dive deep and is never out of touch with the details of the business or the technology
* Expects and requires innovation of her/his team
* Has passion and convictions and the innate ability to inspire passion in others
* Strong results orientation