Design and build the search, ranking, and list systems behind IMDb - the platform hundreds of millions of people use to find movies, shows, and talent. As a senior engineer, you'll own the architecture for core areas of discovery and lead the work to turn these systems into an AI-powered discovery engine built on IMDb's structured data: titles, people, credits, and the relationships between them.
- Own distributed services handling billions of requests across imdb.com, amazon.com, and partner channels
- Lead development and strategy of key system features on IMDb's Discovery platforms, driving intent-based search and AI/ML-powered ranking
- Set engineering standards, mentor engineers, and own your services end to end in production
As a Senior Software Development Engineer (SDE) on this team, you'll own architecture for one or more of these areas, lead multi-engineer efforts where the customer problem is clear but the technical strategy is not, and set the engineering standard others build to. The work sits at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, information retrieval and machine learning, and a uniquely valuable data set.
Key job responsibilities
- Lead the development and technical strategy of key system features for IMDb's search platform on AWS OpenSearch Service - index design, relevance tuning, query performance, and scaling.
- Own the architecture for a significant area of the discovery platform (search/retrieval, ranking, or the list platform), providing a system-wide view and design guidance across the team.
- Lead the design and delivery of complex, multi-engineer projects end to end - scoping, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations - breaking work into parallel streams and integrating it into a coherent whole.
- Build intelligent retrieval and ML-powered ranking, plus platform capabilities (API contracts, versioned SLOs, typed SDKs) for downstream and AI-agent consumers.
- Raise the operational bar: own alarms, telemetry, runbooks, and COE practices, balancing velocity against reliability on the critical path.
- Review designs and code across the team to ensure solutions are well-designed, extensible, performant, and secure; drive adoption of engineering best practices.
- Identify and resolve architecture deficiencies and systemic operational issues, including those where the platform bottlenecks other teams' innovation.
- Mentor engineers and partner with product and program management to shape the discovery roadmap.
- Contribute to AI-native platform practices - steering files, structured knowledge, and agent-readable interfaces for your codebases.
A day in the life
You might open the day reviewing a ranking-signal design and a teammate's pull request, then spend the morning on a thorny retrieval problem - tuning OpenSearch analyzers and query structure so intent resolves against the entity graph. After lunch you meet a partner team onboarding to your search SDK and refine the contract, then write code on the critical path. You close by triaging a signal from the suggestion-search pipeline and updating a runbook. The role moves between deep engineering, design leadership, and operational ownership - often in the same day.
About the team
We own four areas: (1) search and retrieval across IMDb, amazon.com, and affiliated domains; (2) the list platform, growing into a discovery surface with ranking, tagging, and social features; (3) trust - correctness, moderation, and multi-region reliability to published SLOs; and (4) a self-service platform layer that product teams integrate without manual support. Consumers include IMDb Consumer, IMDbPro, and partner and AI-assistant channels. We're building these systems into an AI-native discovery engine grounded in IMDb's structured entity graph - titles, names, credits, and verified relationships no competitor has at this depth.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- 6+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 6+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 6+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- 6+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
- Experience building search, discovery, ranking, recommendation, or information retrieval systems at scale
- Hands-on experience with AWS OpenSearch Service, Elasticsearch, or similar search technologies, including index design, mappings, analyzers, query optimization, relevance tuning, sharding, and cluster performance
- Experience with GraphQL, REST APIs, or similar API technologies, and building platform/self-service integration paths (typed SDKs, versioned contracts)
The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
USA, CA, Santa Monica - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually
