Sr. Technical Program Manager, Amazon Software Builder Insights (ASBI)

Amazon Development Center USA hiring for Sr. Technical Program Manager, Amazon Software Builder Insights (ASBI) jobs in Edmonds, WA, US

The Software Builder Insights team provides the insights that shape creation of the best software builder experience in the world. Our job is to make continuously improving the experience of software builders an inherent part of Amazon’s culture, delivering progress across thousands of autonomous "2-pizza" development teams. We do this by inventing, building, and disseminating the right metrics to drive improvement and by pairing them with recommendations of specific actions teams can take to improve their team's experience building and operating software at Amazon. We use surveys, including Amazon’s Tech Survey, to assess how closely behavioral measures reflect software builders' perceptions, and to gain insights into areas about which we would otherwise lack data.

We know some of the pieces, but influencing change at scale is hard. Creating an exceptional builder experience includes reducing friction builders encounter while developing and releasing software (e.g., manual deployments to production), eliminating toilsome work (e.g., repetitive pages for the same unresolved root cause), and keeping builders in a state of flow. With Amazon’s data-driven culture, measuring outcomes is key to making change. But with thousands of autonomous, already-busy teams, this will require more than just a new set of dashboards. The insights we provide need to be actionable, from both team-level (bottom-up) and organizational-level (top-down) perspectives. Individual teams need power tools that recommend high-impact actions they can take to improve: Which tests are the most flaky? What alarms are paging the on-call the most? Technical leaders in turn need tools to detect which of their teams need help — in what areas — and which of their teams have best-in-class experiences from which others can learn. Leaders need to be able to set improvement goals, and to track progress over time. And they need evidence that investing in the right technical strategies pays dividends, including in the form of better customer, business, and employee outcomes. With Amazon’s tens of thousands of software builders as customers, who have varying levels of experience, are located in dozens of countries, and who work across dozens of industries, edge- and long-tail cases abound.

We are looking for an experienced program manager with a passion for understanding and simplifying complex spaces, who has experience using metrics to drive large-scale organizational change. Your job will be to drive creation of metrics that resonate and insights that stick, in partnership with engineering, product, and UX teammates. The strongest insights are evidence-based, produced by combining measures of behaviors we observe with perceptions reported in surveys, and have data science that validates their importance. You will enable adoption of and engagement with these metrics and insights in programs company-wide, to embed continuous improvement of builder experience in mechanisms across the company.

To drive formulation of new measures, you will work with principal engineers to create a customer and stakeholder engagement model that ensures best-in-industry approaches to measuring developer experience are surfaced, and that nascent measures are vetted and found to be effective and actionable by executive leaders, expert voices, and individual builders alike. You will bridge subject matter experts in software development, data science, research science, and survey methodology to identify what aspects of the builder experience are best assessed by measuring behaviors we see happening in systems, and which are best assessed — or validated — through surveys.

As standardized measures are created, you will drive their adoption in programs across the company, after considering secondary effects of their inspection at scale. Key adoption channels will include both organizational programs (e.g. inspection in recurring business reviews of how long it takes software changes to reach customers), and team-level engagement with insights (e.g. the “flakiest” test to fix, the operational alarm firing the most often) that individual builders act on to improve their own experience each week, as they go about their day-to-day jobs.

What you do in this role will shape how the industry thinks about developer experience, and it will make life better for thousands of people. Giving powerful insights and measures to teams and leaders alike will start a flywheel by which software builder experience improves. As teams reduce friction and toil, they accomplish more. Team members on the ground feel it, and builder experience measures provide concrete evidence to leaders. VP-level leaders see the improvements too, in the form of better business outcomes — higher delivery frequency, less turnover, and even further outages — and provide their own positive reinforcement. Over time, the improvements add up. Builders know it first-hand, and they see it recognized at the highest levels of their organization.

Our team’s level of impact and direct customer access is hard to find elsewhere. The metrics and insights we produce are reviewed at Amazon’s highest organizational levels. Normally, you would have to work on external developer experience products to have this level of impact at this scale. At Amazon, you can do it from the inside, with frequent executive exposure, the ability to get direct, unfiltered customer feedback, and space to partner with others aligned on our mission. It’s a challenging, satisfying space. Come join us. Our software builders will thank you.


Key job responsibilities
- Manage the lifecycle of a complex cross-functional program with impact across organizations, in support of business objective(s) related to improving the experience and effectiveness of Amazon software builders.
- Manage the roadmap for the organization, including ownership of one or more organizational goals. Accountable for overall program strategy as well as driving teams inside and outside your organization to deliver.
- Define clear goals and objectives. Create plans that have clear, measurable success criteria and that make smart trade-offs (e.g., time vs. effort vs. features). Proactively identify and mitigate risks before they become roadblocks.
- Influence technical teams to decouple from dependencies and eliminate architecture problems that stifle innovation or cause user dissatisfaction, development collisions, and/or outages.
- Clearly communicate progress. Report on progress in regular business and program reviews with senior leadership up to the VP level.

About the team
The Amazon Software Builder Experience team was created in 2022 with the mission of creating the world’s best builder experience for tens of thousands of software engineers across both Amazon and AWS. Software Builder Insights works at the core of ASBX, shaping what it means to create the world’s best software builder experience. How do we reduce friction and toil for builders, enabling them to have more time to build features and capabilities that will delight Amazon’s customers? Where should we invest in tooling, automation, operational excellence, knowledge discovery, and training to create the biggest benefits for our builders? Where will standardization help—and where we should we avoid it—to make ownership easier and more empowering for builders? These are just a few of the challenges we are tackling.

Mentorship and Career Growth
Our team is dedicated to supporting new team members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and Amazon tenures, and we’re building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship. ASBX’s product managers enjoy mentoring and on-boarding new team members through one-on-one mentoring and thorough, but kind, document reviews.

We also care about your career growth. We give opportunities that help each team member develop into a better-rounded product manager and that enable them to take on more complex features and services over time. We foster a culture in which it is encouraged to take stretch goals, and in which it is okay to fail as we experiment with new bold ideas.

Inclusive Team Culture
Here at AWS, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have ten employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 16 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.

We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations:

Seattle, WA, USA
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS- 5+ years of working directly with engineering teams experience
- 5+ years of technical program management working directly with software engineering teams experience
- 5+ years of technical product or program management experience
- 3+ years of software development experience
- Experience managing programs across cross functional teams, building processes and coordinating release schedules
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS- Experience defining KPI's/SLA's used to drive multi-million dollar businesses and reporting to senior leadership
- 5+ years of project management disciplines including scope, schedule, budget, quality, along with risk and critical path management experience
- Experience managing technical programs across cross-functional teams, building processes and coordinating release schedules
- Experience building and evaluating system-level technical design

Amazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. The base pay for this position ranges from $119,000/year in our lowest geographic market up to $231,400/year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on a number of factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, please visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits. This position will remain posted until filled. Applicants should apply via our internal or external career site.