Are you passionate about operational excellence, service lifecycle management, and building high-performing engineering teams? We're looking for a **Senior Software Development Manager (SSDM)** to lead our newly formed **Production Engineering** team within the Developer AI Experience (DAE) organization supporting Kiro.
The Production Engineering team is responsible for assuming ownership of KTLO (Keep The Lights On) services that are critical to customers but fall outside of Kiro's core product offering. As the SSDM, you will serve as the GM delegate for this team-driving product decisions on whether to maintain, sunset, transfer, or decommission services, setting operational standards, and ensuring continued customer excellence while minimizing disruption to Kiro's innovation velocity.
This is a unique leadership opportunity to build a team from the ground up, define its operating model, and leverage AI-powered tooling (including AWS Ops Agent) to reimagine how sustaining engineering is done at Amazon.
Key job responsibilities
- **Strategic Service Ownership:** Evaluate a portfolio of inherited KTLO services and determine the path forward for each-shutdown, transfer to consuming teams, sunset via the Walkman deprecation process, or long-term maintenance.
- **Team Leadership:** Lead a team of 10+ SDEs and an SDM, setting vision, operational standards, and a culture of ownership and continuous improvement.
- **Operational Excellence:** Maintain all services at or above AWS operational standards, including on-call support, incident response, software updates, and AWS Campaign compliance.
- **Transition Management:** Drive a structured ownership transition from existing feature teams through knowledge transfer, shared ownership, and full independence phases.
- **Cost Optimization:** Reduce overall operational load by leveraging AI tools to automate operations and minimize maintenance burden.
- **Stakeholder Management:** Partner with Kiro leadership, feature teams, and dependent service consumers to negotiate service transitions, deprecation timelines, and ownership transfers.
- **Risk Mitigation:** Manage complex service transitions (MPS, RTS, Maestro) with careful sequencing to avoid customer impact, ensuring services are transitioned only after traffic offboarding is complete.
- **Talent Development & Retention:** Create an engaging team environment despite the sustaining engineering mission by fostering innovation through AI adoption, automation, and professional growth opportunities.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- 10+ years of engineering experience
- 5+ years of engineering team management experience
- 10+ years of planning, designing, developing and delivering consumer software experience
- Experience partnering with product or program management teams
- Experience managing multiple concurrent programs, projects and development teams in an Agile environment
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related technical field or equivalent
- Experience hiring, developing and promoting engineering talent
- Experience managing teams of 10+ engineers across multiple workstreams
- Track record of building and operating large-scale distributed systems in a production environment
- Experience with service lifecycle management, including deprecation, migration, and operational rundown of legacy systems
- Strong technical judgment to make build vs. buy vs. sunset decisions across a portfolio of services
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Experience partnering with product and program management teams
- Experience designing and developing large scale, high-traffic applications
- Master's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or related field, or PhD
- Knowledge of AWS services
- Experience in crisis management and response or equivalent
- Experience in Developer Tools, IDE/Cloud Development, or AI/ML infrastructure domains
- Experience leading organizational transitions, team mergers, or service ownership transfers at scale
- Track record of leveraging AI/automation tooling to reduce operational burden
- Demonstrated ability to manage ambiguity and drive clarity across multiple stakeholder groups with competing priorities
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, Seattle - 220,100.00 - 297,700.00 USD annually
