We are looking for a Software Development Engineer II who is a strong, independent builder with growing design maturity. You take ownership of significant features and components, drive them from design through production, and operate them with high standards. You write high-quality code, make sound technical decisions with appropriate trade-offs, and proactively improve the systems you touch. You are developing your ability to influence design direction, mentor junior engineers, and think beyond your immediate deliverables to the health of the broader system.

Key job responsibilities

- Own the design and delivery of significant features and components across scalable, multi-tiered applications and services. Drive projects from requirements through design, implementation, testing, deployment, and production operation.

- Write high-quality, well-tested production code using modern languages, design patterns, and frameworks. Hold yourself and your peers to high standards through thorough code reviews.

- Make sound technical decisions with appropriate trade-offs. Evaluate options for caching, retry strategies, concurrency, and data modeling. Justify your choices and communicate trade-offs clearly.

- Design and build for scale and resilience. Consider failure modes, rate limits, traffic bursts, and downstream dependency health in your designs. Implement patterns like backpressure, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation.

- Own operational excellence for your systems. Monitor production health, respond to alarms, investigate root causes, and drive fixes. Write runbooks, improve observability, and reduce operational burden over time.

- Contribute to system-level design discussions.

- Participate actively in design reviews - propose solutions, challenge assumptions, and help the team arrive at better architectures.

- Mentor junior engineers. Support SDE-Is through code reviews, pairing sessions, and technical guidance. Help them grow their skills and develop good engineering habits.

- Understand and translate business requirements.

- Work with stakeholders to understand complex domain rules across punch processing, attendance, scheduling, and compliance. Turn ambiguous requirements into clear technical designs.

- Identify and resolve technical debt proactively.

- Improve code quality, simplify complex logic, optimize performance, and refactor systems to support future growth - without being asked.

- Contribute to team processes and culture.

- Participate in sprint planning, retrospectives, and on-call rotations.

- Raise the bar for engineering practices and help improve team velocity.

A day in the life

You start the day reviewing a design you wrote for a new feature in the compliance system - incorporating feedback from a senior engineer on edge cases around jurisdiction-specific rules. You update the design, get alignment, and start building. Mid-morning, you review a code change from a junior engineer, leaving constructive feedback on error handling and test coverage. After lunch, you investigate a latency spike in one of your services - tracing requests through logs and metrics, identifying a downstream throttling issue, and implementing a retry optimization. You join a design review for a cross-team project, asking questions about failure modes and proposing an alternative caching approach. You close the day deploying your feature to a pre-production environment, validating metrics, and updating the team on progress in standup.

About the team

We are part of Time and Attendance (TAA) within People eXperience Technology (PXT). Our team builds and operates the technology that powers how Amazon tracks, manages, and compensates employee time - globally, across all business lines and geographies.

We own the full technology stack across several critical verticals:

Punch Collection & Processing - Real-time ingestion and processing of punch events from IoT devices and web interfaces through a high-throughput, event-driven serverless architecture.

Attendance - Tracking actual associate work against planned schedules to ensure accurate time records across all business lines.

Scheduling & Schedule Builder - Enabling Operations to plan, build, and manage employee schedules and labor allocation. Scheduling bridges labor planning and pay generation, determining which shifts a site needs and which employees fill them.

Compliance - Enforcing complex, jurisdiction-specific business rules around worked hours, meal and rest break policies, and labor law requirements that vary by role, business, and country.

Our systems operate at a scale an order of magnitude larger than any off-the-shelf solution - and they are growing exponentially. The domain is uniquely challenging: business rules are complex and arcane, data must be replay-able and auditable for any point in an employee's timeline, and every decision we make directly affects how people get paid. If you want to own real systems, grow your design skills, and build toward technical leadership, this is the team.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

- 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

- 1+ years of software development engineer or related occupational experience

- 1+ years of designing and developing large-scale, multi-tiered, multi-threaded, embedded or distributed software applications, tools, systems, and services using: C#, C++, Java, or Perl experience

- 1+ years of Object Oriented Design experience

- Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field

- Experience programming with at least one software programming language

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- 3+ 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

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, WA, Bellevue - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually