Software Development Engineer, Amazon Q

About the role

Amazon Q is helping redefine how developers and cloud practitioners build, operate, troubleshoot, and optimize on AWS. We are building an intelligent assistant that goes beyond answering questions—combining generative AI with AWS context, retrieval, tools, and actions to help customers understand their environments and get work done faster. Building these experiences creates challenging engineering problems. How do you ground an LLM's response in relevant and up-to-date information from a customer's AWS environment while maintaining strong security boundaries and low latency? How do you build agentic experiences that can reason, retrieve information, invoke tools, and take actions reliably and safely? How do you measure and improve the quality of AI-powered experiences when traditional software testing alone is not enough? We are looking for a Software Development Engineer II to help build the next generation of Amazon Q. You will work at the intersection of generative AI, agentic systems, and large-scale distributed services, developing customer-facing capabilities used across AWS. In this role, you will own meaningful features and components from design through production. You will work closely with other engineers, product managers, applied scientists, UX partners, and teams across AWS to translate customer needs into scalable technical solutions. You will contribute to architectural decisions, implement production-quality software, and continuously improve the reliability, performance, and quality of the systems you own. This is an opportunity to work on emerging generative AI technologies while solving real distributed-systems problems at AWS scale.

A day in the life: You'll start the day with the signals from how Amazon Q performed yesterday — satisfaction trends, latency tails, eval results — and pick up the problem that matters most. Mornings might be a design review with applied scientists on retrieval or agent orchestration; afternoons, writing the service code that ships it. You'll partner with PMs, TPMs, and AWS service teams onboarding their own capabilities into the assistant, and you'll own what you build in production. Expect to move between deep distributed-systems work, prompt and evaluation iteration, and A