Senior Software Development Engineer, IMDb Discovery Services

Description

Design and build the search, ranking, and list systems behind IMDb - the platform hundreds of millions of people use to find movies, shows, and talent. As a senior engineer, you'll own the architecture for core areas of discovery and lead the work to turn these systems into an AI-powered discovery engine built on IMDb's structured data: titles, people, credits, and the relationships between them.

- Own distributed services handling billions of requests across imdb.com, amazon.com, and partner channels
- Lead development and strategy of key system features on IMDb's Discovery platforms, driving intent-based search and AI/ML-powered ranking
- Set engineering standards, mentor engineers, and own your services end to end in production

IMDb is the world's most popular source for information on movies, TV shows, and celebrities. IMDb Discovery Services builds the search, list, and ranking platform that helps hundreds of millions of customers find, explore, and connect with the titles and talent they care about. We own real-time suggestion search across imdb.com, amazon.com, and affiliated domains; main and advanced search; charts and discovery widgets; the user list platform; and the ranking systems behind STARmeter, MOVIEmeter, and TVmeter. These services handle billions of requests and sit at the heart of the IMDb experience, powering IMDb Consumer, IMDbPro, and a growing set of partner and AI-assistant channels.

We're evolving this platform into an AI-native discovery engine: intelligent retrieval that understands intent, lists that surface as a discovery experience rather than personal storage, and self-service integration so downstream teams onboard through typed SDKs and versioned contracts. Our search stack is built on AWS OpenSearch Service, and relevance, latency, and scale are first-class engineering concerns. Every generative and agentic experience is grounded in IMDb's structured entity graph of titles, names, credits, and verified relationships — data no competitor has at this depth.

As a Senior Software Development Engineer (SDE) on this team, you'll own architecture for one or more of these areas, lead multi-engineer efforts where the customer problem is clear but the technical strategy is not, and set the engineering standard others build to. The work sits at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, information retrieval and machine learning, and a uniquely valuable data set.

Key job responsibilities
- Lead the development and technical strategy of key system features for IMDb's search platform on AWS OpenSearch Service - index design, relevance tuning, query performance, and scaling.
- Own the architecture for a significant area of the discovery platform (search/retrieval, ranking, or the list platform), providing a system-wide view and design guidance across the team.
- Lead the design and delivery of complex, multi-engineer projects end to end - scoping, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations - breaking work into parallel streams and integrating it into a coherent whole.
- Build intelligent retrieval and ML-powered ranking, plus platform capabilities (API contracts, versioned SLOs, typed SDKs) for downstream and AI-agent consumers.
- Raise the operational bar: own alarms, telemetry, runbooks, and COE practices, balancing velocity against reliability on the critical path.
- Review designs and code across the team to ensure solutions are well-designed, extensible, performant, and secure; drive adoption of engineering best practices.
- Identify and resolve architecture deficiencies and systemic operational issues, including those where the platform bottlenecks other teams' innovation.
- Mentor engineers and partner with product and program management to shape the discovery roadmap.
- Contribute to AI-native platform practices - steering files, structured knowledge, and agent-readable interfaces for your codebases.

A day in the life
You might open the day reviewing a ranking-signal design and a teammate's pull request, then spend the morning on a thorny retrieval problem - tuning OpenSearch analyzers and query structure so intent resolves against the entity graph. After lunch you meet a partner team onboarding to your search SDK and refine the contract, then write code on the critical path. You close by triaging a signal from the suggestion-search pipeline and updating a runbook. The role moves between deep engineering, design leadership, and operational ownership - often in the same day.

About the team
We own four areas: (1) search and retrieval across IMDb, amazon.com, and affiliated domains; (2) the list platform, growing into a discovery surface with ranking, tagging, and social features; (3) trust - correctness, moderation, and multi-region reliability to published SLOs; and (4) a self-service platform layer that product teams integrate without manual support. Consumers include IMDb Consumer, IMDbPro, and partner and AI-assistant channels. We're building these systems into an AI-native discovery engine grounded in IMDb's structured entity graph - titles, names, credits, and verified relationships no competitor has at this depth.

Basic Qualifications

- 6+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 6+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 6+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team

Preferred Qualifications

- 6+ 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
- Experience building search, discovery, ranking, recommendation, or information retrieval systems at scale
- Hands-on experience with AWS OpenSearch Service, Elasticsearch, or similar search technologies, including index design, mappings, analyzers, query optimization, relevance tuning, sharding, and cluster performance
- Experience with GraphQL, REST APIs, or similar API technologies, and building platform/self-service integration paths (typed SDKs, versioned contracts)

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits .

USA, CA, Santa Monica - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually