Software Development Engineer, Production and Post Production Technology

Amazon•Culver City, CA

21h

About The Position

Amazon MGM Studios is seeking a Software Development Engineer II to contribute to our Studio in the Cloud (SITC) platform. SITC is transforming entertainment content creation by moving all major production and post-production workflows from traditional on-premises infrastructure to AWS cloud-based solutions. This initiative encompasses nine core workflows—Dailies, Editorial, VFX, Sound, Conform, Color, Mastering, QC/Delivery, and Remote Production—representing the complete content creation lifecycle from Original Camera Footage (OCF) ingestion through final delivery. In this role, you will deliver working software features and improvements for critical SITC platform components. You may own features within workflows such as media transcoding optimization, file transfer acceleration, playback performance improvements, rendering job orchestration, or quality control automation. You will design and implement distributed systems that enable creative professionals to work globally using industry-standard tools integrated on AWS. Your work will address difficult technical problems including efficient media processing at scale, reliable high-bandwidth data transfer, responsive interactive workflows, and integration with creative tool vendors like Avid, Adobe, Colorfront, and Blackmagic. As an SDE II, you will work autonomously on feature development, delivering across the full software lifecycle including working backwards from customers, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations. You will balance constraints and limit short-term workarounds to create sustainable, maintainable solutions. You will seek guidance from your manager, SDE 3s, or Principal Engineers when facing trade-offs, and participate in inclusive, constructive technical discussions with team members and adjacent teams. Your systems will support Amazon MGM Studios' production slate spanning 150+ titles annually across International Originals and Global Originals. This role requires solid technical skills in distributed systems, software development, and cloud infrastructure. You will implement solutions that handle large-scale media data (productions generate 10-50TB each), maintain responsive performance for creative workflows, and integrate with complex vendor systems. Success requires writing high-quality, well-tested code that can be maintained and extended by others, while delivering features that directly impact the creative teams using SITC for their productions.

Requirements

3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
1+ years of software development engineer or related occupational experience
1+ years of designing and developing large-scale, multi-tiered, multi-threaded, embedded or distributed software applications, tools, systems, and services using: C#, C++, Java, or Perl experience
1+ years of Object Oriented Design experience
Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
Experience programming with at least one software programming language

Nice To Haves

3+ 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

Responsibilities

Deliver working software features and improvements to major portions of SITC platform components, including new development as well as refactoring and deprecation work for workflows such as media ingestion, transcoding, collaboration infrastructure, rendering orchestration, or delivery automation
Design software solutions to enable new features or improve existing systems, working with team leadership to ensure designs align with long-term architectural strategy. May still require guidance on complex architectural decisions
Contribute significantly to the full software development lifecycle including scoping, design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance of the team's software. Work backwards from customers and stakeholders to understand business and customer value in order to deliver the right solutions
Work on difficult technical problems with visible risks or roadblocks including: optimizing media processing performance for large files (multi-GB assets), implementing reliable data transfer across regions with varying network conditions, building responsive APIs for interactive creative tools, integrating with vendor systems that have specific technical requirements, and ensuring system reliability for productions that cannot tolerate failures
Write high-quality production code that meets the Amazon Code Bar including well-written implementations using language idioms correctly, maintainable logic that others can understand and extend, robust error handling, efficient resource usage, comprehensive testing, and operational visibility through logging and metrics
Actively participate in operational support for your team, ensuring root causes of operational issues are identified and resolved with permanent fixes rather than temporary workarounds. Routinely identify and execute on opportunities to improve team operations
Provide meaningful code review feedback to others including more senior engineers, and actively seek feedback on your own work early enough to be actionable. Participate in design reviews and contribute constructive perspectives
Mentor other engineers on your team including SDE 1s and new teammates, training them on how the team's software is constructed, tested, operated, secured, and how it fits into the bigger picture
Demonstrate operational excellence in all work including robust testing, monitoring and alerting, incident response, and maintaining system availability. Make effective priority trade-offs between new feature development and operational improvements
Communicate effectively with your team about the work you deliver, documenting what your team's software does, how it is constructed and operated, how secure it is, and how it integrates with other systems