Software Development Engineer, Alexa Skills Kit, Alexa Skills Kit

Interested in Amazon Echo? Ever wonder whats involved in enabling millions of developers to create skills for Alexa? Then come help us build the Alexa Skills Kit that developers use every day to expand Alexa s skill set!

Alexa is the name of the Amazon cloud service that powers Echo, the groundbreaking new Amazon device designed around your voice. Echo is always ready just ask for information, music, news, weather and more. Skills are like apps for Alexa, and provide a new channel for your content and services. Skills let customers use their voices to perform everyday tasks. Skill Builders publish skills in the Alexa Skills Store to reach and delight customers on hundreds of millions of Alexa devices.

In Alexa Skills Kit Run time team you will build tier 1 services and systems that enables Alexa voice experience. You set technical standards and drive the overall technical architecture and engineering practices for both Alexa team and also numerous third party developers. You will design systems that handles, stores, dispatches, transforms API s (1P/3P), events, directives etc. You will be responsible for designing and implementing low latency, highly secure, high available, low cost, scalable tier 1 services that establishes communication between Alexa and 3P developers. Additionally, these tier 1 services will integrate with other Alexa and AGI (LLM) services to power a magical customer experience. Lastly, you will be responsible for implementing the operational best practices for these services to sustain Alexa Peak readiness days.

Our goal is make Alexa an instantly familiar personal assistant that is always ready to help or entertain on any device. At the core of this vision is Alexa Skills Developer Technologies, a close-knit team that s dedicated to providing software developers with the tools, primitives, and services they need to easily create engaging customer experiences that expand the wealth of information, products and services available on Alexa.

You ve found the right team if you are a passionate software engineer with experience building innovative applications that customers love. You will join a growing organization in Bellevue, WA and have an enormous opportunity to make an impact on the design, architecture, and implementation of cutting edge products used every day, by people you know.

We re working hard, having fun, and making history; come join us!

Key job responsibilities
- Building software that runs with high quality on millions of Echo family devices, and Alexa-enabled Devices.
- Taking a long-term view of architecture, proactively fixing deficiencies and/or proposing larger projects.
- Understanding the business impact of your systems and show good judgment when making technical trade-offs.
- Driving engineering best practices (e. g. , Operational Excellence, Security, Quality, etc. ) and set standards.
- When confronted with discordant views, you are able to find the best way forward and influence others to follow that path, building consensus.
- You contribute to the professional development of colleagues, improving their technical knowledge and engineering practices

A day in the life
A typical day will start with a morning huddle to catch up on what you and your team worked on the previous day. This is usually followed by some white-board (pre-covid) design discussions on the problems the team is working on, with afternoon mostly spent on project design and implementation work with a heavy dose of code reviews from and for your team along the way. We are a fun, close knit team where everyone is ready to roll their sleeves and help each other out, push boundaries and have fun doing it!

About the team
Alexa Skills Kit or ASK is an organization within Alexa on a mission to empower skill builders to create delightful and engaging experiences by making Alexa more natural, accurate, conversational, and personalized. Skills are like apps for Alexa and provide a new channel for your content and services. Skills let customers use their voices to perform everyday tasks like checking the news, listening to music, playing a game, and more. Organizations and individuals can publish skills in the Alexa Skills Store to reach and delight customers on hundreds of millions of Alexa devices. - 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience programming with at least one software programming language