Software Development Engineer

Job description

DESCRIPTION

Amazon's Zeitgeist team is the authoritative voice on what millions of Amazon customers are doing right now. Features that we own include Sales Rank, Amazon's Best Sellers lists, and Movers and Shakers; not only are these features are used by millions of customers each day to discover new products and navigate Amazon's massive selection, they're famous enough to have their own entry on Amazon's Wikipedia article.

We build systems to harness the collective intelligence found in the billions of interactions that happen on our global family of websites. Our algorithms seek out the most useful aggregate patterns amongst an enormous sea of noise. These patterns are then made available to the shopping customer who benefits from the experience of millions of customers who came before them.

Our systems operate at massive scale. Our computational statistics and data mining algorithms are able to process billions of transactions made by hundreds of millions of customers on a catalog with hundreds of millions of items. Our systems are responsive – customers want to know what's happening on Amazon right now, not yesterday or last week. The online services which vend our data get billions of requests per day. That's tens of thousands of requests per second, every second of every day. And, we do it all with a lot less hardware than you think; we take pride in the efficiency of our systems.

We're end-to-end owners; the Zeitgeist team owns the entire implementation of our features from front-end rendering to online services to data processing algorithms. We experiment relentlessly to learn how best to serve Amazon's customer, whether through new ways to present the results of our current algorithms, new algorithms to identify useful customer patterns, or both together.

We're seeking a skilled and creative software engineer to help invent the future of product discovery.

About you:

You're an experienced engineer, looking for a career where you'll be able to build, deliver, and impress. You enjoy getting computers to make intelligent decisions in the face of real-world noisy data and coupled with customer experiences that present those decisions to end users. You challenge yourself and others to constantly come up with better solutions. You're a thought leader and you demonstrate this by building solutions that deliver long term value for your customers, not just by having ideas. You develop strong working relationships with others and want to work in a collaborative team environment. You want to create value and make a real impact to the delight of millions of people worldwide.

About us together:

We're going to design and deliver the next generation of product discovery features. Along the way, we're going to face seemingly impossible problems. We're going to argue about how to solve them, and we'll work together to find a solution that is superior to each of the proposals we came in with. We'll make tough decisions, but we'll all understand why. We'll be the dream team.

Questions?

You may already know if you're a fit, but perhaps you're worried about technology and experience requirements? Don't be - we're looking for a smart, proven engineer; if you're the right candidate, we're flexible. A strong candidate with a solid background in mathematics, high volume systems, or front-end feature development should have no problems excelling in our team. You're still worried? Here are some things that we'd prefer to see, though none is independently a requirement:

· Experience building large-scale data mining systems
· Experience with algorithm development involving real-world noisy data
· Experience mentoring and training others on complex technical issues
· Proven ability to take a project from scoping requirements through actual launch of the project
· Sharp analytical abilities, proven design skills, excellent communication skills, and an ability to pick up new technical skills quickly
· Strong sense of ownership, urgency, and drive, and a track record of delivery
· Passion for building new products in a fast paced, team-oriented environment.

Desired profile

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

· Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Math or related field, or equivalent experience
· 2+ years professional experience in software development
· Strong Computer Science fundamentals in data structures, algorithm design, problem solving, and complexity analysis
· Mastery of at least one modern programming language such as Java, C/C++
· Strong written and oral communication skills