Lead the team that ensures Amazon associates get paid accurately - every single day. As a Software Development Manager in TAA, you lead the talented SDEs, tech strategy, and delivery for one of Amazon"s most critical real-time platforms: a high-throughput, event-driven architecture processing millions of punch events globally.
Amazon is one of the largest employers on the planet with hundreds of thousands of employees across the globe. Come join us in our journey to deliver solutions for one of the most complex domains in People eXperience Technology (PXT). We own and deliver technology to manage employee time expectations and compute their pay, globally, for all our current and emerging businesses. At the core, we are in the business of analytics - real-time and event-driven - of data collected from IoT devices (time clocks) and web user interfaces. We own our own high-availability services to support this processing, and require the ability to work from replay-able, auditable "truth" for any point in an employee"s timeline. Our business rules are complex and arcane, varying by role, business, and jurisdiction. We are solving all these problems at Amazon scale, an order of magnitude larger than supported by any commodity solutions and growing exponentially.
We are looking for a Software Development Manager who combines strong technical depth with proven people leadership. You will own the roadmap, delivery, and operational health of critical systems while building a team of engineers who thrive in ambiguity and deliver at the highest bar. You set the technical direction in partnership with your senior engineers, remove blockers, make resourcing trade-offs, and create an environment where engineers do the best work of their careers. You are equally comfortable in a design review debating architecture trade-offs and in a 1:1 coaching an engineer through a growth challenge.
Key job responsibilities
Build, lead, and grow a high-performing engineering team. Hire top talent, set clear expectations, develop engineers at all levels, and create a culture of ownership, innovation, and operational excellence.
Own the technical roadmap and delivery. Define priorities across punch processing, attendance, scheduling, and compliance systems. Balance new feature delivery, scaling investments, and technical debt reduction.
Drive technical direction in partnership with senior engineers. Engage deeply in architecture and design reviews. Make high-judgment calls on system trade-offs - caching strategies, capacity planning, concurrency models, and third-party dependency management.
Deliver results on aggressive timelines. Manage execution across multiple workstreams, remove blockers, make resourcing trade-offs, and hold the team accountable to commitments while protecting sustainable pace.
Own operational health end-to-end. Set the bar for reliability, monitoring, alarming, and incident response. Drive operational reviews, reduce mean time to resolution, and ensure systems meet SLAs under peak traffic.
Scale the platform for exponential growth. Partner with engineers to plan capacity, conduct load testing, identify bottlenecks, and execute scaling strategies for systems under rapid device and traffic growth.
Manage stakeholder relationships. Communicate roadmap, trade-offs, and risks clearly to senior leadership, partner teams, and business stakeholders. Influence without authority across organizational boundaries.
Develop engineers and build leadership depth. Coach SDEs on technical growth, ownership, and leadership behaviors. Identify and develop future technical leads and managers within the team.
Drive organizational excellence. Improve team processes - sprint planning, on-call rotations, design review cadences, and hiring bar. Contribute to org-wide initiatives and raise the bar for engineering culture.
A day in the life
You start the day in a 1:1 with a senior engineer, aligning on the architecture approach for a scaling initiative and coaching them on how to drive cross-team consensus. You join a design review, asking the hard questions about failure modes, rate-limit handling, and graceful degradation. You step into a sprint planning session, helping the team prioritize between a compliance feature launch and a critical performance optimization. You review operational metrics - queue depths, processing latency, error rates - and decide whether to escalate a trending issue. You meet with your SDM peers and director to align on headcount planning and roadmap trade-offs for the next quarter. You close the day reviewing resumes for an open role, calibrating on the bar with your hiring loop. Throughout it all, you protect your team"s focus, remove blockers, and create space for engineers to do deep technical work.
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 lead a team solving hard distributed systems problems with real-world impact, this is the team.