Job Description

Here’s a breakdown of a typical job description for a Software Development Engineer (SDE) role at Amazon — including key responsibilities, qualifications, and what you can expect. (This is based on publicly-posted Amazon job listings.)

🎯 Role Overview

As an SDE at Amazon, you’ll work on large-scale, high-impact systems that serve millions of customers worldwide. One example: you may be part of a team that builds services for catalog expansion, or customer-facing features, or back-end infrastructure for global operations.
You’ll typically own the full life-cycle of software: from design & architecture, through coding, testing, deployment and operation.

✅ Key Responsibilities

Based on various job postings, typical responsibilities include:

• Design and implement scalable, maintainable software solutions, often with high throughput, low latency, and global scale.

• Own systems or components end-to-end: from requirements gathering, technical architecture, implementation, to monitoring & operations.

• Collaborate with product managers, UX/design, other engineering teams, stakeholders to define features and bring them to production.

• Apply best practices for software development: code reviews, testing, monitoring, observability, performance, security, maintenance.

• Reduce technical debt, improve system reliability and scalability, and innovate.

🎓 Basic & Preferred Qualifications

Basic requirements (for entry/early-level SDE roles) typically include:

• Bachelor's (or higher) degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline.

• Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Java, C++, C#, Python).

• Core computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, complexity analysis.

Preferred/advanced qualifications (for more senior levels) typically include:

• Several years (e.g., 2+ or 3+) of professional software development experience (non-internship) and systems design/architecture experience.

• Experience building distributed, scalable systems, understanding of cloud or big data technologies, microservices, terabyte-scale data, etc.

• Strong software engineering practices: code reviews, source control, build & release processes, CI/CD, operations monitoring.

🧭 Example: SDE I vs SDE II

• SDE I (early-career): May require 0-1 years or minimal professional experience. For example: “1+ years of non-internship professional software development experience” in one SDE-1 posting.

• SDE II (mid-level): Requires more experience (e.g., 3+ years dev, 2+ years of systems design) and ability to own large-scale architecture.

🧑‍💼 What They Look For Personally

• Ownership and drive: being able to “own” a system/component and see it through.

• Problem solving and ability to deal with ambiguity: many roles mention tackling “complex”, “ill-defined” problems at scale.

• Strong communication and teamwork: working across disciplines (product, UX, operations) and sometimes mentoring others.

• Alignment with Amazon culture / leadership principles (though this is less emphasized in the technical JD but known in Amazon interview context).

📍 For you in India

• Many of the job postings we saw are in India (e.g., Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Karnataka) for Indian development centres.

• The expectations are similar globally but may vary slightly in local context (tech stack, domain, scale).

• If you’re based in Lucknow and willing to relocate or join remotely (if allowed) you can still apply. Check the job location.

Skills Required

• Communication Skills
• Problem Solving & Time Management
• Software skills