Software Development Manager, HR Experience and Tech
Amazon
1 day ago
Full-time
On-site
Bellevue, Washington, United States
Company Culture & Engagement
Ready to transform how millions of Amazonians experience HR support? Apply now and join us in building the future of employee experience technology at Amazon scale.
We are seeking a Software Development Manager (SDM) to lead a critical engineering team responsible for building the intelligent foundation of Amazon's employee support platform. In this high-impact role, you will drive both the technical vision and team development for engineers building AI-powered conversational systems, knowledge management platforms, and intelligent routing solutions that serve millions of employees daily.
This is a unique opportunity to combine leading-edge generative AI, large-scale distributed systems, and human-centered design to solve real problems that affect every Amazonian's daily work life. You'll lead a team of talented engineers—from SDE I to SDE III—building systems that don't just respond to employee questions but anticipate needs, learn from interactions, and continuously improve the employee experience.
What makes this role exciting:
• Massive scale and impact: Your systems will serve 1.5M+ Amazonians across 200+ countries and territories.
• AI at the forefront: Build production generative AI systems using Amazon Bedrock, LLMs, and agentic frameworks for policy-compliant, context-aware HR support.
• Platform architecture: Shape the MHLS (Multi-Tenant HR Line of Service) platform architecture with reusable services and domain-specific features.
• Technical complexity: Solve challenges in natural language understanding, knowledge retrieval, multi-modal interactions, and real-time personalization.
• Cross-organizational influence: Partner with HR, operations, and technology teams across Amazon and PXT.
• Innovation culture: Work in an environment that encourages experimentation and bold technical bets.
Key job responsibilities
Technical Leadership
• Lead architectural design of critical PXT CMS platform features—highly scalable, maintainable, aligned with AWS best practices.
• Architect AI-powered solutions leveraging AWS services (Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda) for predictive support and automated workflow orchestration.
• Design robust integration patterns between HR systems (Workday, ServiceNow, internal tools) ensuring security and compliance.
• Partner with SDE-IIIs and Principal Engineers on 3-year architecture plans, balancing long-term vision with immediate customer impact.
• Establish engineering excellence through coding standards, design patterns, and best practices.
• Champion operational excellence via monitoring, alerting, and continuous reliability improvement.
• Research and evaluate emerging technologies to simplify systems and enable new capabilities.
People Leadership
• Build high-performing teams by recruiting top talent in distributed systems, AI/ML, and platform engineering.
• Mentor junior engineers (SDE-I, SDE-II) on engineering excellence and Leadership Principles.
• Develop future leaders through career planning, stretch assignments, and growth opportunities.
• Foster ownership and innovation culture where engineers propose bold ideas and learn from failures.
• Manage performance through regular 1:1s, clear expectations, constructive feedback, and recognition.
• Create inclusive environment valuing diverse perspectives.
• Retain talent by understanding motivations, providing challenges, and creating career paths.
• Collaborate with SDMs and PMs to deliver team-level goals.
Product Delivery
• Partner with stakeholders to translate complex requirements into elegant technical solutions.
• Lead cross-team initiatives and drive consensus on architectural decisions.
• Deliver high-impact features improving employee satisfaction, resolution time, and self-service adoption.
• Implement micro-frontend applications and guided workflows empowering domain teams.
• Design intelligent automation for workforce management and service delivery.
• Balance speed and quality through pragmatic trade-offs.
• Own end-to-end delivery from requirements through launch and iteration.
• Manage complex programs with clear communication and proactive risk mitigation.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Influence product strategy with technical insights; translate business needs into technical roadmaps.
• Integrate AI/ML models into production with appropriate guardrails and monitoring.
• Ensure technical solutions enable intuitive, delightful employee experiences.
• Engage HR stakeholders to understand pain points and demonstrate value.
• Drive alignment on shared services and architectural standards across PXT and AET.
• Represent team in operations reviews, architecture reviews, and strategic planning.
• Meet customers directly to understand problems and influence priorities.
Operational Excellence
• Lead operations reviews to understand system health and maintain availability.
• Root cause and resolve customer tickets, using incidents as learning opportunities.
• Establish metrics-driven culture using data for decisions.
• Drive continuous improvement through blameless post-mortems and automated remediation.
• Ensure 99.99% uptime for critical HR support systems.
A day in the life
Your days will be dynamic and varied, balancing strategic thinking with hands-on technical leadership:
• Review and elevate code quality by providing insightful comments on teammates' code changes, raising the bar on engineering excellence.
• Design systems for Amazon scale by creating design documents that solve complex problems and presenting them to build consensus on your recommended approach.
• Drive operational excellence by attending operations review meetings to understand system health and identify proactive actions to maintain availability.
• Practice customer obsession by meeting with HR service teams and employees to understand their challenges, brainstorm solutions, and influence team priorities.
• Mentor and develop talent through 1:1 meeting with team members, providing support on their work and discussing career development opportunities.
• Research and innovate by evaluating new technologies (Gen AI capabilities, AWS services, architectural patterns) and sharing findings with the team.
• Solve customer problems by root causing and resolving trouble tickets, ensuring customers receive timely and effective support.
• Collaborate across teams by partnering with Principal Engineers, other SDMs, and product managers to align on technical direction and delivery plans.
• Learn and grow through mentorship from senior engineers and Principal Engineers while working on challenging technical problems.
Success Milestones
• First 30 days: Understand PXT CMS architecture, build stakeholder relationships, identify quick wins, establish team 1:1s.
• First 90 days: Establish technical vision aligned with 3YAP, make key hires, ship meaningful improvements, lead first cross-team initiative.
• First year: Deliver major Gen AI features improving metrics, build high-performing team, establish trusted partnerships, drive architectural improvements, mentoring engineers to promotion.
About the team
Want to revolutionize HR support for millions of Amazonians worldwide? Join the Employee Services Technology team within Amazon's People eXperience & Technology (PXT) organization.
We're building the PXT CMS—a transformative platform for case management that combines AI-powered employee relationship management with intelligent automation. Our mission: transform HR support delivery through swift, accurate, personalized experiences at Amazon scale.
What we're building:
• AI-enhanced unified platform for personalized HR support.
• Intelligent systems that anticipate employee needs proactively.
• Seamless experiences connecting service teams across Amazon's HR ecosystem.
• Scalable solutions optimizing workforce management and operational efficiency.
We're implementing Gen AI solutions using LLMs and Agentic AI, building the next generation of intelligent HR service delivery that serves 1.5M+ Amazonians across 200+ countries.
- 3+ years of engineering team management experience
- 7+ years of working directly within engineering teams experience
- 3+ years of designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems 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 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
- Experience with AI/ML systems including natural language processing, conversational AI, large language models (LLMs), or generative AI applications in production
- Background in conversational platforms like chatbots, virtual assistants, contact center solutions, or customer service automation
- Experience with HR technology platforms such as Workday, ServiceNow, or employee experience systems, understanding the unique challenges of internal-facing systems
- Knowledge of compliance and data security requirements for HR systems, including GDPR, data residency, and privacy regulations
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.
USA, WA, Bellevue - 184,900.00 - 250,200.00 USD annually
We are seeking a Software Development Manager (SDM) to lead a critical engineering team responsible for building the intelligent foundation of Amazon's employee support platform. In this high-impact role, you will drive both the technical vision and team development for engineers building AI-powered conversational systems, knowledge management platforms, and intelligent routing solutions that serve millions of employees daily.
This is a unique opportunity to combine leading-edge generative AI, large-scale distributed systems, and human-centered design to solve real problems that affect every Amazonian's daily work life. You'll lead a team of talented engineers—from SDE I to SDE III—building systems that don't just respond to employee questions but anticipate needs, learn from interactions, and continuously improve the employee experience.
What makes this role exciting:
• Massive scale and impact: Your systems will serve 1.5M+ Amazonians across 200+ countries and territories.
• AI at the forefront: Build production generative AI systems using Amazon Bedrock, LLMs, and agentic frameworks for policy-compliant, context-aware HR support.
• Platform architecture: Shape the MHLS (Multi-Tenant HR Line of Service) platform architecture with reusable services and domain-specific features.
• Technical complexity: Solve challenges in natural language understanding, knowledge retrieval, multi-modal interactions, and real-time personalization.
• Cross-organizational influence: Partner with HR, operations, and technology teams across Amazon and PXT.
• Innovation culture: Work in an environment that encourages experimentation and bold technical bets.
Key job responsibilities
Technical Leadership
• Lead architectural design of critical PXT CMS platform features—highly scalable, maintainable, aligned with AWS best practices.
• Architect AI-powered solutions leveraging AWS services (Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda) for predictive support and automated workflow orchestration.
• Design robust integration patterns between HR systems (Workday, ServiceNow, internal tools) ensuring security and compliance.
• Partner with SDE-IIIs and Principal Engineers on 3-year architecture plans, balancing long-term vision with immediate customer impact.
• Establish engineering excellence through coding standards, design patterns, and best practices.
• Champion operational excellence via monitoring, alerting, and continuous reliability improvement.
• Research and evaluate emerging technologies to simplify systems and enable new capabilities.
People Leadership
• Build high-performing teams by recruiting top talent in distributed systems, AI/ML, and platform engineering.
• Mentor junior engineers (SDE-I, SDE-II) on engineering excellence and Leadership Principles.
• Develop future leaders through career planning, stretch assignments, and growth opportunities.
• Foster ownership and innovation culture where engineers propose bold ideas and learn from failures.
• Manage performance through regular 1:1s, clear expectations, constructive feedback, and recognition.
• Create inclusive environment valuing diverse perspectives.
• Retain talent by understanding motivations, providing challenges, and creating career paths.
• Collaborate with SDMs and PMs to deliver team-level goals.
Product Delivery
• Partner with stakeholders to translate complex requirements into elegant technical solutions.
• Lead cross-team initiatives and drive consensus on architectural decisions.
• Deliver high-impact features improving employee satisfaction, resolution time, and self-service adoption.
• Implement micro-frontend applications and guided workflows empowering domain teams.
• Design intelligent automation for workforce management and service delivery.
• Balance speed and quality through pragmatic trade-offs.
• Own end-to-end delivery from requirements through launch and iteration.
• Manage complex programs with clear communication and proactive risk mitigation.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Influence product strategy with technical insights; translate business needs into technical roadmaps.
• Integrate AI/ML models into production with appropriate guardrails and monitoring.
• Ensure technical solutions enable intuitive, delightful employee experiences.
• Engage HR stakeholders to understand pain points and demonstrate value.
• Drive alignment on shared services and architectural standards across PXT and AET.
• Represent team in operations reviews, architecture reviews, and strategic planning.
• Meet customers directly to understand problems and influence priorities.
Operational Excellence
• Lead operations reviews to understand system health and maintain availability.
• Root cause and resolve customer tickets, using incidents as learning opportunities.
• Establish metrics-driven culture using data for decisions.
• Drive continuous improvement through blameless post-mortems and automated remediation.
• Ensure 99.99% uptime for critical HR support systems.
A day in the life
Your days will be dynamic and varied, balancing strategic thinking with hands-on technical leadership:
• Review and elevate code quality by providing insightful comments on teammates' code changes, raising the bar on engineering excellence.
• Design systems for Amazon scale by creating design documents that solve complex problems and presenting them to build consensus on your recommended approach.
• Drive operational excellence by attending operations review meetings to understand system health and identify proactive actions to maintain availability.
• Practice customer obsession by meeting with HR service teams and employees to understand their challenges, brainstorm solutions, and influence team priorities.
• Mentor and develop talent through 1:1 meeting with team members, providing support on their work and discussing career development opportunities.
• Research and innovate by evaluating new technologies (Gen AI capabilities, AWS services, architectural patterns) and sharing findings with the team.
• Solve customer problems by root causing and resolving trouble tickets, ensuring customers receive timely and effective support.
• Collaborate across teams by partnering with Principal Engineers, other SDMs, and product managers to align on technical direction and delivery plans.
• Learn and grow through mentorship from senior engineers and Principal Engineers while working on challenging technical problems.
Success Milestones
• First 30 days: Understand PXT CMS architecture, build stakeholder relationships, identify quick wins, establish team 1:1s.
• First 90 days: Establish technical vision aligned with 3YAP, make key hires, ship meaningful improvements, lead first cross-team initiative.
• First year: Deliver major Gen AI features improving metrics, build high-performing team, establish trusted partnerships, drive architectural improvements, mentoring engineers to promotion.
About the team
Want to revolutionize HR support for millions of Amazonians worldwide? Join the Employee Services Technology team within Amazon's People eXperience & Technology (PXT) organization.
We're building the PXT CMS—a transformative platform for case management that combines AI-powered employee relationship management with intelligent automation. Our mission: transform HR support delivery through swift, accurate, personalized experiences at Amazon scale.
What we're building:
• AI-enhanced unified platform for personalized HR support.
• Intelligent systems that anticipate employee needs proactively.
• Seamless experiences connecting service teams across Amazon's HR ecosystem.
• Scalable solutions optimizing workforce management and operational efficiency.
We're implementing Gen AI solutions using LLMs and Agentic AI, building the next generation of intelligent HR service delivery that serves 1.5M+ Amazonians across 200+ countries.
- 3+ years of engineering team management experience
- 7+ years of working directly within engineering teams experience
- 3+ years of designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems 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 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
- Experience with AI/ML systems including natural language processing, conversational AI, large language models (LLMs), or generative AI applications in production
- Background in conversational platforms like chatbots, virtual assistants, contact center solutions, or customer service automation
- Experience with HR technology platforms such as Workday, ServiceNow, or employee experience systems, understanding the unique challenges of internal-facing systems
- Knowledge of compliance and data security requirements for HR systems, including GDPR, data residency, and privacy regulations
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.
The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
USA, WA, Bellevue - 184,900.00 - 250,200.00 USD annually