Sr. Software Development Manager - Production Engineering, Kiro

About the role

The Production Engineering team is responsible for assuming ownership of KTLO (Keep The Lights On) services that are critical to customers but fall outside of Kiro's core product offering. As the SSDM, you will serve as the GM delegate for this team—driving product decisions on whether to maintain, sunset, transfer, or decommission services, setting operational standards, and ensuring continued customer excellence while minimizing disruption to Kiro's innovation velocity.

Key job responsibilities

• Evaluate a portfolio of inherited KTLO services and determine the path forward for each—shutdown, transfer to consuming teams, sunset via the Walkman deprecation process, or long-term maintenance.
• Lead a team of 10+ SDEs and an SDM, setting vision, operational standards, and a culture of ownership and continuous improvement.
• Maintain all services at or above AWS operational standards, including on-call support, incident response, software updates, and AWS Campaign compliance.
• Drive a structured ownership transition from existing feature teams through knowledge transfer, shared ownership, and full independence phases.
• Reduce overall operational load by leveraging AI tools to automate operations and minimize maintenance burden.
• Partner with Kiro leadership, feature teams, and dependent service consumers to negotiate service transitions, deprecation timelines, and ownership transfers.
• Manage complex service transitions (MPS, RTS, Maestro) with careful sequencing to avoid customer impact, ensuring services are transitioned only after traffic offboarding is complete.
• Create an engaging team environment despite the sustaining engineering mission by fostering innovation through AI adoption, automation, and professional growth opportunities.

About the team

Diverse Experiences
AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience
• 5+ years of engineering team management experience
• 10+ years of planning, designing, developing and delivering consumer software experience
• Experience partnering with product or program management teams
• Experience managing multiple concurrent programs, projects and development teams in an Agile environment
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related technical field or equivalent
• Experience hiring, developing and promoting engineering talent
• Experience managing teams of 10+ engineers across multiple workstreams
• Track record of building and operating large-scale distributed systems in a production environment
• Experience with service lifecycle management, including deprecation, migration, and operational rundown of legacy systems
• Strong technical judgment to make build vs. buy vs. sunset decisions across a portfolio of services

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience partnering with product and program management teams
• Experience designing and developing large scale, high-traffic applications
• Master's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or related field, or PhD
• Knowledge of AWS services
• Experience in crisis management and response or equivalent
• Experience in Developer Tools, IDE/Cloud Development, or AI/ML infrastructure domains
• Experience leading organizational transitions, team mergers, or service ownership transfers at scale
• Track record of leveraging AI/automation tooling to reduce operational burden
• Demonstrated ability to manage ambiguity and drive clarity across multiple stakeholder groups with competing priorities