What would you do if you had access to the world’s largest product catalog with billions of products, offers, images, reviews, searches, and much more? Amazon’s Catalog Systems division is looking for an exceptional engineering manager to lead, architect and deliver solutions that enhance the richness and quality of our massive product catalog utilizing cloud computing, big data analytics, machine learning algorithms, human intelligence and crowd sourcing. You will be managing a diverse team of engineers, product managers and research scientists, innovating in collective human intelligence.

An information-rich and accurate product catalog is a critical strategic asset for Amazon. It powers unrivaled product discovery, informs customers’ buying decisions, offers a large selection and positions Amazon as the first stop for our customers. This is a unique position that provides an opportunity to build data-driven systems at a scale rarely available anywhere else. As a leader of this team you will conceive and deliver software solutions that leverage existing data patterns to measure and improve the quality of various aspects of our product catalog and influence the way millions of our customers discover and buy our products worldwide. The opportunity (puzzle to solve) is that there is no single solution as the problem scope is varied and diverse. The solutions you build will vary from simple rule based systems to machine learning, semantic analysis and text processing.

Here is a sample of some of the cool areas you will be involved in:
Scalability: Design and think at scale. Amazon’s product catalog has billions of records with a mind boggling variety of products and millions of customers in multiple countries. We build systems and design algorithms that are able to handle these large amounts of data and make sure the cloud usage scales sub-linear with the ever growing data size. Where traditional solutions fail we develop approximate, distributed, and streaming algorithms.

Data analysis: We build data analytical workflows to dig into the huge amounts of data available at Amazon using data mining, machine learning, and statistics. We look for patterns, train thousands of models and use them to build solutions that improve the catalog quality. We collect knowledge through crowdsourcing and auditing and train models that generalize across the catalog.
Statistics: Optimal techniques to sample the massive product catalog for humans to audit different dimensions of data quality issues and consolidating the results.
Measure and Improve: We obsess on identifying new ways to measure the effectiveness of our solutions and ways to improve them. We identify areas of improvement in our frameworks, tools, processes and strive to make them better. We continually evaluate our success metrics and evolve our reporting systems.
Systems: We leverage Amazon’s cloud infrastructure to scale. We create production workflows and applications utilizing AWS technologies such as EMR, SWF, Data Flow, RedShift and SQS. Our systems must run reliably in the face of variations in the input data or local hardware failures in distributed systems.

Key job responsibilities
- Develop the long-term strategy for your programs and translate that into an achievable road map.
- Lead a nimble team of software engineers to architect, develop, test and deploy high quality software solutions with persistent customer focus within an Agile/Scrum environment.
- Manage and execute against project plans and delivery commitments.
- Manage departmental resources: hiring, mentoring, career management and maintaining a high performing team.
- Report on status of development, quality, operations, and system performance to management.