Software Development Engineer II - Prime Video

DESCRIPTION
Job summary
The Playback Optimization team owns and operates the software and services that iteratively optimize the quality and reliability of Prime Video playback by leveraging insights gained through the direct observation of our customers. Our services and systems are invoked each time our customers click play to ensure that playback parameters are tailored to deliver the best possible Quality of Experience. We develop new player heuristics and use ML models and simulation to increase customer engagement, detect QoS anomalies, and drive programmatic improvements to playback quality.

A day in the life
You will have an opportunity to explore, innovate, invent and simplify various Playback state-of-art Optimization services and algorithms which leverage both custom and Industry proven Machine Learning, Natural Language processing and Artificial Intelligence technologies. In this role you will have an opportunity to collaborate with a team of ML/AI scientists to influence our overall Playback Optimization technical strategy and help define the team’s long-term technical road map. You will spearhead best practices that enable a quality product, and help coach and develop junior engineers.

About the hiring group
The team owns the client and service-side systems responsible for video quality selection during playback. This includes the 1) Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) algorithms (heuristics) that are deployed on Prime Video players and 2) the services which continuously optimize the playback Quality of Experience for each stream. This team owns the 1) Prime Video unified heuristics SDK responsible for ABR and CDN selection, 2) ML models used for clustering and classification of customer sessions based on their historic network performance, and 3) services that automate and continuously tune heuristic parameters to optimize the playback Quality of Experience for each stream.

Job responsibilities
As an SDE on our team you will need to tackle complex problems that span a variety of domains: Machine learning, Artificial intelligence, Natural Language processing, real-time and distributed systems and help us build services and systems from ground up which scale and serve billions of requests per day, with obsessively high reliability and low operational overhead. You will have an opportunity to explore, innovate, invent and simplify various Playback state-of-art Optimization services and algorithms which leverage both custom and Industry proven Machine Learning, Natural Language processing and Artificial Intelligence technologies. In this role you will have an opportunity to collaborate with a team of ML/AI scientists to influence our overall Playback Optimization technical strategy and help define the team’s long-term technical road map. You will spearhead best practices that enable a quality product, and help coach and develop engineers.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
2 - 4 years of experience contributing to the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems.
2+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
Programming experience with at least one modern language such as Java, C++, or C# including object-oriented design

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field
• Equivalent experience to a Bachelor's degree based on 3 years of work experience for every 1 year of education
• 3+ years professional experience in software development
• Computer Science fundamentals in object-oriented design
• Computer Science fundamentals in data structures
• Computer Science fundamentals in algorithm design, problem solving, and complexity analysis
• Proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as C, C++, C#, Java