Software Development Engineer, Alexa Skills Kit, Alexa Skills Kit

Software Development Engineer, 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, providing a 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.

The Alexa Skill Builder Growth team’s charter is to enable Skill Builders to 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. For example, 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 customers' utterances by providing build and runtime signals. We are continuously experimenting with new ways to drive Skill Builder growth, and the successful ones are made 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 to 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 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’ve found the right team if you are a passionate software engineer with experience building innovative applications that customers love. 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!

Key job responsibilities
- Building software that runs with high quality on millions of Echo family devices and Alexa-enabled Devices using the latest fast-moving technologies including LLM.
- Taking a long-term view of architecture, proactively fixing deficiencies and/or proposing larger projects.
- Understanding the business impact of your systems and showing good judgment when making technical trade-offs.
- Driving engineering best practices (e.g., Operational Excellence, Security, Quality, etc.) and setting standards.
- When confronted with discordant views, you are able to find the best way forward and influence others to follow that path, building consensus.
- Contributing to the professional development of colleagues, improving their technical knowledge and engineering practices.

A day in the life
A typical day will start with a morning huddle to catch up on what you and your team worked on the previous day. This is usually followed by some white-board design discussions on the problems the team is working on, with afternoons mostly spent on project design and implementation work with a heavy dose of code reviews from and for your team along the way. We are a fun, close-knit team where everyone is ready to roll their sleeves up, help each other out, push boundaries, and have fun doing it!

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 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

- 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience.
- 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience.
- 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability, and scaling) of new and existing systems experience.
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead, or leading an engineering team.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent.

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