DESCRIPTION

We are the Paralanguage Understanding and Response team. Our vision is to understand the 60-90% of human communication that is non-verbal and use that, merged with verbal communication, to intelligently respond to the individual so that conversing with Alexa is like talking with close, trusted, emotionally intelligent friend. Our mission is to understand the meaning of all non-verbal signals. We then use that understanding to modify Alexa’s verbal and non-verbal responses so that they are emotionally intelligent by owning and delivering improvements in social skills and empathy so that conversations with an individual are more natural for all languages, cultures, and contexts on all Alexa-enabled devices. You will collaborate closely with experts in machine learning and human language technology, and contribute to advancing the state of the art in human language understanding systems.

We have solved many complex problems to get to where we are today, but there are still plenty of challenges ahead of us, and Alexa is getting smarter every day. We are looking for passionate and talented Software Engineers who have experience building innovative, mission critical, highly scalable features that delight our customers.

In your role as a Software Development Engineer, you will have an opportunity to build features that are used every day by people you know and handles several hundreds of millions of requests every day. Your work will have a large impact on the design, architecture, and implementation of everything the team works on. If developing scalable, distributed web services and designing long-term platform architectures excites you and you revel in thinking about well-architected code we would love to talk to you!

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

· 2+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
· Programming experience with at least one modern language such as Java, C++, or C# including object-oriented design
· 1+ years of experience contributing to the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems.
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field
• Equivalent experience to a Bachelor's degree based on 3 years of work experience for every 1 year of education
• Computer Science fundamentals in object-oriented design
• Computer Science fundamentals in data structures
• Computer Science fundamentals in algorithm design, problem solving, and complexity analysis
• Proficiency in, at least, one modern programming language such as C, C++, Java, or Perl

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

· Bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, math or other related disciplines.
· Advanced programming in Java on Linux and/or Windows environment.
· Experience exploring technical feasibility tradeoffs.
· Experience building complex software systems that have been successfully delivered to customers
· Knowledge of professional software engineering practices & best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
· Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and management to collect requirements, describe software product features, and technical designs
· Strong sense of ownership, urgency, and drive.