Amazon Photos helps consumers preserve and re-live their memories. The service comes with unlimited photo storage for Prime members and apps are available on iOS, Android, Web, Desktop, Fire Tablet & Fire TV. We are also integrated into Alexa devices such as Echo Show and Echo Spot.

Amazon Photos is looking for a Software Development Engineer to join the Data Gateway Team! We are a foundational backend infrastructure team that focuses on enabling secure, reliable, and performant access to Photos backend data. Our team creates a centralized access layer for data spread across multiple microservices and provides support for low-latency search and high-throughput batch compute access patterns through OpenSearch clusters and our data lake.

Our team manages a diverse set of critical systems and services. We are responsible for managing search and translation APIs that enable low-latency searching, filtering, and aggregation of customer data, including our semantic search feature that enhances search accuracy and relevance. We maintain an S3 data lake (Chelan) for Photos customer metadata that enables high-throughput data analysis. The team provides centralized access to customer metadata across various DynamoDB tables and operates LocationService that converts photo coordinates to searchable locations with translations.

Security is one of our core tenets. The content and metadata we operate on is critical in nature since it is customer's personal data. We adopt best security standards to safe-guard this data. These includes using correct encryption techniques, refining permission and access controls etc.

Our sheer scale and responsibility brings us a lot of challenging problems which we love to solve! We handle massive amounts of customer data, which creates unique challenges in data processing, indexing, and retrieval at scale. Our team continuously works on optimizing our systems to provide fast and efficient access to this data while maintaining high availability and reliability.

Key job responsibilities
- You will work on a foundational backend team building and maintaining critical data access infrastructure for the Photos product.
- You will develop and optimize search and data retrieval systems using OpenSearch, DynamoDB, and S3 technologies to operate efficiently at scale.
- You will design and implement solutions for processing and indexing large volumes of customer metadata while maintaining high performance and reliability.
- You will work closely with business, product, and technical stakeholders to understand requirements, investigate design approaches, and drive measurable success.
- You will contribute to improving engineering excellence through implementing robust security measures, optimizing data processing pipelines, and enhancing operational efficiency.
- You will work in an agile environment to deliver high-quality software with limited guidance, focusing on both immediate needs and long-term scalability.

A day in the life
As a member of the Amazon Photos Data Gateway team, you will work with other talented engineers to build and optimize the centralized data access layer that powers Amazon Photos. Your work will focus on designing and maintaining high-performance search and data retrieval systems that handle massive amounts of customer metadata. You will ensure that our infrastructure can efficiently process, index, and serve data while maintaining strict security standards for protecting customer information. You will collaborate with teams across Photos to provide reliable data access solutions and contribute to the evolution of our search and data lake infrastructure. As we handle critical customer data at scale, you will be responsible for implementing robust security measures and optimizing data processing pipelines. You will be a technical contributor who helps drive engineering excellence and mentors other engineers on the team.

About the team
Amazon Photos is the latest digital offering to consumers released on the heels of the Amazon Music and Amazon Video offerings. We have bold goals to scale growth and adoption of the service around the world and delight our customers with a great product.

Amazon Photos organization is composed of software development engineers eager to learn and strong owners who thrive in a collaborative, fast-paced environment. We’re an inclusive team that genuinely enjoys working together and celebrating our successes.

We have an exciting roadmap ahead, with plans to continuously enhance the quality and reliability of our inference services while expanding our AI/ML infrastructure to handle rapidly growing photo and video upload volumes. These efforts are crucial for driving long-term growth and delighting Amazon Photos customers. If you share our passion for building world-class AI systems, we’d love to have you join us.