Software Development Engineer, Alexa Skills Kit, ASK

Alexa is the name of the Amazon cloud service that powers Echo, the groundbreaking new Amazon device designed around your voice.

Echo is always ready just ask for information, music, news, weather and more. Skills are like apps for Alexa, and provide a new channel for your content and services.

Skills let customers use their voices to perform everyday tasks. Skill Builders publish skills in the Alexa Skills Store to reach and delight customers on hundreds of millions of Alexa devices.

Alexa Skill Builder Growth team’s charter is to enable Skill Builders grow their business on Alexa. We do this by building publicly available intelligent web services and intuitive web-based tools that help Skill Builders drive discoverability of their skills, enable natural and seamless interactions between skills and generate revenue.

E.g., our name-free interaction (NFI) Toolkit makes it easier for customers to find and open skills without having to remember and say the skill’s name.

NFI enables skills to compete for customer's utterances by providing build and runtime signals. We are continuously experimenting with new ways for driving Skill Builder growth and the ones that succeed, we make them publicly available.

We are measurably making Alexa smarter, and we need your help to define and build the next generation of capabilities.

Key job responsibilities

Interested in Amazon Echo? Ever wonder what's involved in enabling millions of developers to create skills for Alexa? Then come help us build the Alexa Skills Kit that developers use every day to expand Alexa’s skill set!

Our goal is make Alexa an instantly familiar personal assistant that is always ready to help or entertain on any device. At the core of this vision is Alexa Skills Developer Technologies, a close-knit team that’s dedicated to providing software developers with the tools, primitives, and services they need to easily create engaging customer experiences that expand the wealth of information, products and services available on Alexa.

You’ve found the right team if you are a passionate software engineer with experience building innovative applications that customers love.

You will join a growing organization in Bellevue, WA and have an enormous opportunity to make an impact on the design, architecture, and implementation of cutting edge products used every day, by people you know.

We’re working hard, having fun, and making history; come join us!

Key job responsibilities

Building software that runs with high quality on millions of Echo family devices, and Alexa-enabled Devices.

Taking a long-term view of architecture, proactively fixing deficiencies and / or proposing larger projects.

Understanding the business impact of your systems and show good judgment when making technical trade-offs.

Driving engineering best practices (e.g., Operational Excellence, Security, Quality, etc.) and set standards.

When confronted with discordant views, you are able to find the best way forward and influence others to follow that path, building consensus.

You contribute to the professional development of colleagues, improving their technical knowledge and engineering practices

A day in the life

A typical day will start with a morning huddle to catch up on what you and your team worked on the previous day. This is usually followed by some white-board (pre-covid) design discussions on the problems the team is working on, with afternoon mostly spent on project design and implementation work with a heavy dose of code reviews from and for your team along the way.

We are a fun, close knit team where everyone is ready to roll their sleeves and help each other out, push boundaries and have fun doing it!

About the team

Alexa Skills Kit or ASK is an organization within Alexa on a mission to empower skill builders to create delightful and engaging experiences by making Alexa more natural, accurate, conversational, and personalized.

Skills are like apps for Alexa and provide a new channel for your content and services. Skills let customers use their voices to perform everyday tasks like checking the news, listening to music, playing a game, and more.

Organizations and individuals can publish skills in the Alexa Skills Store to reach and delight customers on hundreds of millions of Alexa devices.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
• Experience programming with at least one software programming language

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 3+ 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
30+ days ago