Software Development Manager

As a Software Development Manager for this team, you'll lead the engineers building the horizontal platform that enables all 30+ advertising agents and skills to move at speed. You'll own the strategic direction for real-time data ingestion from sources like our data warehouse and Kafka streams, the data processing pipelines that generate pre-computed advertiser context, and the MCP server infrastructure that delivers this data with sub-second latency. This role offers a unique blend of technical leadership and strategic influence, with ownership over a platform that's becoming the automatic choice for every agent team at Amazon Advertising. You'll collaborate with Applied Scientists pioneering advanced AI patterns, work with engineering teams across advertising agents and skills, and partner with product leaders to define the future of agent-data interaction. Your expertise will be instrumental in establishing architectural patterns for real-time data delivery at scale, optimising for both performance and developer experience, and building a platform that makes trustworthy, instant advertiser context the default for all agents.
The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:
Technical Leadership and Platform Vision:
Lead the design and evolution of platform architecture, establishing patterns for real-time data ingestion, processing, and delivery that scale across advertising agents and skills.
Partner with Principal Engineers and architects across Amazon Advertising to influence long-term technical direction for agent infrastructure.
Own the technical roadmap, balancing immediate customer needs with platform scalability and extensibility.
Team Management and Development:
Manage, mentor, and grow a team of engineers building mission-critical real-time data infrastructure.
Foster a culture of innovation, technical excellence, and customer obsession while maintaining sustainable engineering practices.
Conduct performance reviews, career development planning, and succession planning for team members.
Create quality bar raisers within the organisation and promote technical leaders.
Platform Operations and Excellence:
Establish operational excellence standards for a platform processing billions of data points with 1-3 minute refresh cadences.
Drive system reliability, monitoring, and incident response practices, ensuring 99.9%+ availability for agent teams.
Implement delivery and quality governance mechanisms, ensuring timely execution of the platform roadmap.
Define success metrics and key performance indicators demonstrating measurable impact on agent performance, developer productivity, and customer experience.
Cross-Functional Collaboration and Influence:
Collaborate with agent builder teams to understand data requirements and drive platform adoption.
Partner with Applied Scientists to productionize research innovations in agent orchestration and large language model optimisation.
Engage with product managers and senior leadership to align platform capabilities with business strategy.
Work with Technical Program Managers to coordinate cross-team dependencies and ensure successful launches.
Requirements:
7+ years of engineering experience.
3+ years of engineering team management experience.
8+ years of experience leading the definition and development of multi-tier web services.
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 live site operations.
Experience partnering with product or program management teams.
Experience designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems.
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
9-13 yrs