Principal Software Development Engineer - Prime

Amazon.com hires people from all types of backgrounds, into positions based all over the world. We recruit the best and brightest. Why Join Amazon.com? At Amazon, we believe that every day is still Day One. A day to take a first step. A day to look forward to new challenges. And today is that day for you. It's your day to be a part of something great. Your day to make your ideas come to life. And your day to join a company that redefines itself every day. That's the energy and excitement behind Amazon. Principal Software Development Engineer - Prime Amazon Prime is a unique membership program providing unlimited, express delivery on millions of items sold by Amazon.com. Since its introduction in 2005, Prime has become an important engine of growth for Amazon.com — Prime members buy more items, shop more often, and spend more than the average Amazon.com customer. The customer-facing part of Prime is just the tip of the iceberg; underneath lies a large, complex set of machinery and processes designed to make the customer experience intuitive, effortless and sometimes surprisingly insightful for our members and prospective members. We have great opportunities, challenging technology and business problems, and rock-solid software and services that are evolving by leaps and bounds.  Our team is one that has, is and will continue to make a difference and in the end, move mountains.  We think deeply, carefully and big about our customers, technology, business challenges, team and Amazon in everything we do, every day.   Do you consider yourself to be among the best hands-on large-scale distributed systems engineers in the industry? Are you an expert at building, managing, and operating massive, highly dynamic, computationally complex mission-critical services?  Do you have deep expertise in experimental modeling, segmentation and optimization; in expert systems and automated analytical engines; in datamining; in near real-time, high throughput, capture and processing of data; in workflow; in planning and goal-driven behavioral systems? Principal Engineers provide technical leadership at Amazon.com. They help establish performance and technical standards for the infrastructure we build and help drive Amazon’s overall technical architecture, software development practices, and engineering methodologies. They are responsible for maintaining and raising our technical standards by mentoring and reviewing the work of other engineers. Principal Engineers recommend and build high quality, architecturally sound systems that align to the business needs of the organization they support. They think globally when building systems, ensuring Amazon.com builds high performing, scalable systems that fit well together. Principal Engineers are pragmatic visionaries who can translate business needs into workable technology solutions. Their expertise is deep and broad. They are hands on, producing both detailed technical work and high-level architectural designs. They often provide leadership on the most demanding and subtle technology applications in the company. Specific responsibilities of the Prime Principal SDE would include: Overall Prime architecture and service/system evolution, including leading the effort to build an highly automated, closed loop, goal-oriented system which performs customer behavior modeling, experimentation, and targeting.  This system will be used for both marketing of Prime to non-members and for customizing the user experience for existing members.  This will require development within Prime's existing systems as well as collaboration with other teams throughout Amazon.  It is expected that this work would lead to both valuable, possibly patentable, intellectual property as well as new business opportunities for the company. Technical leadership of the Prime team and company's efforts to more natively integrate Prime with major systems throughout the company.  Leadership and innovation of technology surrounding and in support of subscriptions-based products and the platform components upon which they depend. Division-wide mentoring and developing SDEs.Individuals interested in this position should have experience in building high-performance, reliable systems in a complex, multitiered, distributed environment (Service Oriented Architecture). The ideal candidate will have experience working with C++, Java, relational databases and distributed computing technologies. Experience in data mining and data analysis is a big plus, but not required.