Are you ready to write code for millions of customers? Would you like to point to customer-facing features on one of the most popular websites in the world and say, “I built and shipped that” after your first few weeks on the job? As a Software Developer on the Amazon Answers team you will envision and create features that touch every Amazon customer and transform the online shopping experience.
Who you’ll work with: The Amazon Answers team is a small, scrappy team that employs lean agile development. We work in two-week iterations and ship code daily. We hate building stuff that customers don’t want, so before we invest in large production systems we quickly validate our hypotheses with small tests. We are incredibly close to customers: as an engineer on our team, you will regularly call customers to learn more about their experiences with our program. When we do build out systems for scale, they must handle a blistering number of transactions per second. We take pride in owning our entire code stack, from how fast our templates render in the customer’s browser through to our service layer and down to the underlying data model. We are a diverse team from a variety of backgrounds and interests who love dreaming up, validating, and shipping features that deliver big customer impact.
The problems you’ll work on: You will build software that engages the Amazon community to get answers to customer product questions as quickly as possible. Our problem space provides a unique blend of challenges: you will build social features to connect customers to one another, you will play with large datasets, you will analyze customer-submitted content using natural language processing techniques and you will build distributed systems to make this content available in real time to our customers.
Some example challenges that face our engineering team every day:
How would you help a customer who is shopping for a new camera lens find the right information? What if the website doesn’t have the information? How would you determine who in the Amazon community we should direct this question to?
What are the most important questions to a customer before making a purchase? How would you automatically answer these questions before the customer even knows what to ask?
Everyone on the team is a product owner. How can you continuously improve the Amazon Answers experience for customers every day? What are your ideas to change the shopping experience? How do you make them a reality for millions of customers?
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Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field, or 4+ year relevant work experience
8+ years professional experience in software development
Computer Science fundamentals in object-oriented design
Computer Science fundamentals in data structures
Computer Science fundamentals in algorithm design, problem solving, and complexity analysis
Proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as C, C++, Java
Experience building complex software systems that have been successfully delivered to customers
Knowledge of professional software engineering practices & best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and management to collect requirements, describe software product features, and technical designs
Ability to take a project from scoping requirements through launch
Familiarity with front-end Javascript libraries, like Ajax and JQuery
Proficiency with SQL, and SQL databases
Understanding of distributed data storage and caching
