The Senior Software Development Engineer role at Amazon DynamoDB focuses on designing and building distributed indexing, retrieval, and ranking infrastructure for advanced search capabilities. The team is dedicated to enhancing DynamoDB's functionality by integrating vector similarity search, full-text search, and hybrid search across operational data. This position offers the opportunity to work on complex problems at the intersection of databases, distributed systems, and machine learning. Candidates will contribute to shaping new capabilities from foundational architecture to customer launch.

• 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture experience of new and existing systems
• 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 using C#, C++, Java, or Perl
• 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
• 3+ years of full software development life cycle experience, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations

• Design and implement distributed vector, full-text, and hybrid-search capabilities for DynamoDB.
• Build vector-indexing and approximate nearest-neighbor retrieval mechanisms for high-dimensional embeddings.
• Develop full-text indexing and retrieval capabilities, including tokenization, text analysis, inverted indexes, relevance scoring, and phrase or term-based search.
• Build hybrid retrieval and ranking that combines vector similarity, lexical relevance, and structured attribute filters.
• Evaluate ranking and result-fusion techniques for combining semantic and lexical results.
• Design distributed query execution, including partition selection, query fan-out, local retrieval, top-k result merging, filtering, and aggregation.
• Build index lifecycle mechanisms covering creation, backfill, incremental updates, compaction, schema or configuration changes, rebalancing, recovery, and deletion.
• Ensure that indexes remain sufficiently synchronized with changes to the underlying DynamoDB data.
• Integrate search indexes with DynamoDB’s distributed storage, partitioning, replication, and query-processing systems.
• Optimize tradeoffs among search quality, recall, relevance, query latency, ingestion throughput, index freshness, memory usage, and storage.

• Employees at Amazon are often offered comprehensive health benefits—including multiple medical plan options (no pre-existing condition exclusions, 100% covered in-network preventive care), dental and vision plans, a 24/7 medical advice line from day one, expert second-opinion services, and broad mental-health support with several free counseling sessions (including pediatric). Financial wellness typically includes a 401(k) with company match (up to 2%), Restricted Stock Units (equity), FSAs, an emergency savings program, product and partner discounts, and even college-savings and home-purchase programs. Overall, the package is designed to support employees and their families’ health, finances, and day-to-day life.