Software Development Manager, Amazon Prime Video, Prime Video Play Starts

Come build the future of entertainment with us!
Are you interested in shaping the future of movies and television? Do you want to define the next generation of how and what Amazon customers are watching? Prime Video is a premium streaming service that offers customers a vast collection of TV shows and movies - all with the ease of finding what they love to watch in one place. We offer customers thousands of popular movies and TV shows including Amazon Originals and exclusive licensed content, and exciting live sports events. We also offer members the opportunity to subscribe to add-on channels they can cancel anytime, and to rent or buy new-release movies and TV box sets on the Prime Video Store. Prime Video is a fast-paced, growth business, available in over 200 countries and territories worldwide. The team works in a dynamic environment where innovating on behalf of our customers is at the heart of everything we do.
Are you excited about the online streaming future of the NFL, French Open, UEFA Champions League, and English Premier League? That's just half of it. We are also the home of The Expanse, The Boys, The Lord of the Rings, and the largest streaming content library in the world. Prime Video Play Starts is responsible for building the multi-tenant, highly scalable, low-latency services that power the Play button for all of Prime Video.
We are growing rapidly and looking for strong leaders who are up for one of the biggest challenges in the video streaming business: live-streaming millions of concurrent streams and delivering high-quality content to millions of users worldwide.
At Prime Video, you'll experience the benefits of working in a dynamic, entrepreneurial environment. You will own and operate business-critical, high-throughput services that deliver content to our customers in a reliable and low-latency manner.
We are looking for a Software Development Manager to lead one of the engineering teams within Prime Video Play Starts You will own a set of services on the critical path of every Play click, with direct impact on customer experience across VOD and live events at Prime Video's full global scale.
You'll lead a team of senior and mid-level engineers building distributed systems that operate at millions of requests per second, with latency and availability targets that leave little margin for error. Success in this role is measured as much by the engineers you grow and the technical culture you build as by the systems you ship.
Key job responsibilities
- Build and grow a strong engineering team. Hire, develop, and retain engineers across levels. Own the career growth of each of your direct reports with the same rigor you bring to system design.
- Set the bar for technical excellence through the team. Create forums - design reviews, architecture discussions, operational reviews, where the team debates tradeoffs openly and reaches decisions together. Leverage your senior engineers as technical multipliers, and use your own technical judgment to ask sharper questions.
- Own business-critical services end to end. Drive the roadmap, architecture, delivery, and operational excellence of services on the Play path. Set and meet high bars for availability, latency, and cost efficiency.
- Operate a 24x7 live service. Lead the team's on-call posture, incident response, and post-incident learning. Reduce operational load over time through durable engineering investments, not heroics.
- Partner broadly. Work closely with product, program, partner engineering teams, and leadership to shape multi-year strategy and deliver on quarterly commitments.
- Raise the hiring bar. Participate actively in interview loops, coach interviewers on your team, and help grow the broader Prime Video India engineering organization.
A day in the life
Your morning might start with an incident review from an overnight page - asking the right questions to get to root cause. Mid-morning you're in a design review for a new live-streaming capability, where your senior engineer is driving the discussion and your role is to make sure the right tradeoffs get surfaced and the right stakeholders are aligned. You spend the afternoon in 1:1s, where you're asking about career goals and blockers. You wrap up with a sync with your counterparts in Seattle on the quarterly roadmap, and a written narrative reviewing your team's operational metrics for the month.
About the team
Prime Video Play Starts is the team behind the Play button. Every stream a customer starts - a Thursday Night Football game with tens of millions of concurrent viewers, a rewatch of The Boys, a rental from the Prime Video Store - flows through systems our team builds and operates. We work across Seattle and India as a single engineering organization, with deep ownership in both locations. The org has charter over core playback services and is growing as we expand into more live sports and more geographies.
- 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
- 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
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