Software Development Manager, Alexa Skills Kit

Alexa is the name of the Amazon cloud service that powers Echo, the groundbreaking new Amazon device designed around your voice. Echo is always ready ? just ask for information, music, news, weather and more. Skills are like apps for Alexa, and provide a new channel for your content and services. Skills let customers use their voices to perform everyday tasks. Skill Builders publish skills in the Alexa Skills Store to reach and delight customers on hundreds of millions of Alexa devices.

Alexa Skill Builder Growth team's charter is to enable Skill Builders grow their business on Alexa. We do this by building publicly available intelligent web services and intuitive web-based tools that help Skill Builders drive discoverability of their skills, enable natural and seamless interactions between skills and generate revenue. E.g., our name-free interaction (NFI) Toolkit makes it easier for customers to find and open skills without having to remember and say the skill's name. NFI enables skills to compete for customer's utterances by providing build and runtime signals. We are continuously experimenting with new ways for driving Skill Builder growth and the ones that succeed, we make them publicly available. We are measurably making Alexa smarter, and we need your help to define and build the next generation of capabilities as we shift focus towards trending Large Language Models(LLM).

Key job responsibilities

Interested in Amazon Echo? Ever wonder what's involved in enabling millions of developers to create skills for Alexa? Then come help us build the Alexa Skills Kit that developers use every day to expand Alexa's skill set!

Our goal is make Alexa an instantly familiar personal assistant that is always ready to help or entertain on any device. At the core of this vision is Alexa Skills Developer Technologies, a close-knit team that's dedicated to providing software developers with the tools, primitives, and services they need to easily create engaging customer experiences that expand the wealth of information, products and services available on Alexa.

You will join a growing organization working on top technology using Large Language Models(LLM) and have an enormous opportunity to make an impact on the design, architecture, and implementation of cutting edge products used every day, by people you know.

We're working hard, having fun, and making history; come join us!

1. Be responsible for the end to end ownership of a technology team, including setting the technical vision for developing our systems to serve Alexa's needs.

2. Build and manage great software engineers that are responsible for developing and maintaining software.

3. Be an advocate of engineering and operational excellence.

4. Establish a consistent, project management framework and excellent development processes to deliver high quality software, in rapid iterations.

5. Show strong business and technical judgment that will accelerate time to market of releases, while incrementally moving our services towards the long term vision.

6. Be responsible for mentoring and developing engineers.

7. Represent the technical organization and evangelize the work to senior leadership.

8. Raise the bar on technical excellence, show thought leadership, and communicate well to different audiences.

About the team

Alexa Skills Kit or ASK is an organization within Alexa on a mission to empower skill builders to create delightful and engaging experiences by making Alexa more natural, accurate, conversational, and personalized. Skills are like apps for Alexa and provide a new channel for your content and services. Skills let customers use their voices to perform everyday tasks like checking the news, listening to music, playing a game, and more. Organizations and individuals can publish skills in the Alexa Skills Store to reach and delight customers on hundreds of millions of Alexa devices.

Basic Qualifications

7+ years of engineering experience

3+ years of engineering team management experience

8+ years of leading the definition and development of multi tier web services experience

Knowledge of engineering practices and patterns for the full software/hardware/networks development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, certification, and livesite operations

Experience partnering with product or program management teams

Experience designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and senior leadership to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical designs, and product strategy

Experience in recruiting, hiring, mentoring/coaching and managing teams of Software Engineers to improve their skills, and make them more effective, product software engineers