As a Principal Software Engineer, you bring structure to ambiguous business problems and use science, logic, and practical experience to decompose them into straightforward, scalable solutions. You set the standard for scientific excellence and make decisions that affect the way we build and integrate algorithms. Your solutions are exemplary in terms of system design, clarity, efficiency, and extensibility. You tackle intrinsically hard problems; you're interested in learning; and you acquire skills and expertise as needed.Your expertise is deep and broad; you’re hands on, producing both detailed technical work and high-level architectural designs.
Principal Engineers are pragmatic visionaries who can translate business needs into workable technology solutions. Their expertise is deep and broad. They are hands on, producing both detailed technical work and high-level architectural designs.

Key job responsibilities
- Serve as a technical lead on our most demanding, cross-functional projects.
- Ensure the quality of architecture and design of systems.
- Functionally decompose complex problems into simple, straight-forward solutions.
- Fully and completely understand system interdependencies and limitations.
- Possess expert knowledge in performance, scalability, enterprise system architecture, and engineering best practices.
- Leverage knowledge of internal and industry prior art in design decisions.
- Effectively research and benchmark Amazon technology against other competing systems in the industry.
- Contribute intellectual property through patents.
- Assist in the career development of others, actively mentoring individuals and the community on advanced technical issues and helping managers guide the career growth of their team members.
- Exert technical influence over multiple teams, increasing their productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience.