Software Development Engineer III, SC.os Auth and Vendor Service

Are you passionate about building software systems that operate at massive scale? Do you thrive when tackling ambiguous technical challenges and turning them into elegant, well-architected solutions? As a Software Development Engineer III at Amazon, you will lead the design and delivery of complex software systems that directly impact millions of customers. You will own your team's architectural direction, drive technical strategy, and mentor engineers while continuing to write exemplary code. This role offers the opportunity to work across the full software lifecycle — from defining product strategy through deployment and operations — solving problems where constraints are real and tradeoffs matter. If you are a collaborative, curious engineer who loves building things that last, we want to hear from you.

Key job responsibilities

• Lead the design, implementation, and delivery of multi-engineer software projects, owning your team's architectural direction and ensuring systems are well-designed, extensible, performant, and secure.
• Write high-quality, production-ready code that demonstrates best practices in organization, clarity, error handling, and documentation, while evaluating opportunities to integrate generative AI tools to augment productivity.
• Drive technical strategy by balancing short-term delivery needs against long-term maintainability, identifying one-way-door decisions, and advocating for the right solutions across your team and dependent systems.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define requirements, clarify assumptions, and resolve conflicting constraints, ensuring alignment on system design tradeoffs including scalability, performance, and security.
• Mentor and coach engineers on your team and across related teams, contribute to recruiting efforts, and establish strong operational practices including alarms, telemetry, runbooks, and retrospective processes.

A day in the life
You start your morning reviewing operational dashboards and addressing any alerts from overnight. By mid-morning, you are deep in a design review with engineers from a partner team, working through interface contracts and dependency tradeoffs. After lunch, you pair with a teammate on a tricky implementation problem, then shift to writing a technical design document for an upcoming project. You close the day in a mentoring session, helping a colleague think through their career growth and next technical challenge.

About the team
Our team builds software that matters to Amazon's customers and business at scale. We value technical excellence, thoughtful collaboration, and a commitment to getting the details right. We believe great software comes from inclusive teams where every voice is heard and engineers are empowered to take ownership of meaningful problems. We are focused on building reliable, scalable systems for the long term, and we are looking for engineers who share that vision and want to grow alongside us.

Basic qualifications

• 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
• 5+ 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

• 5+ 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

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

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 Clara - 193,300.00 - 261,500.00 USD annually