Come lead the embedded software team behind the world's largest fleet of mobile robots — and behind the next generation of them. Your team's software runs on more than a million robots working around the clock in Amazon fulfillment centers across North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. These drive units are the backbone of the fulfillment engine: most Amazon orders pass through them, and they are a key enabler of one-day and same-day Prime delivery.
This role has two halves and both are hard. One is systematic reliability at scale: any single robot can fail without anything breaking, but the system as a whole has to keep moving, and a firmware change ships to the entire world — so the bar is not whether one robot works, it's whether a change is safe across a million of them. The other is a new robot on a demanding schedule, where the hardware, the software, and the requirements are all being invented at once.
Your team owns the software that makes each robot move and keeps it safe — real-time motion control, power and charging, connectivity, and the safety components that hold a robot in a safe state — across every generation in the fleet and the new robots still being designed. You won't write most of the code, but you'll own the decisions, and you'll pick up the ball yourself when nobody else does.
Key job responsibilities
As the manager of this team, you will:
- Hire and develop world-class embedded software engineers into effective teams, solving challenges that have never been solved before
- Draw on your own experience to review, guide, and coach the team, helping them avoid pitfalls and produce products and systems that are world-class and industry-leading
- Own your team's software and the data it produces: keep credibility as a technical peer, lead the response when something goes wrong in the field, make fleet behavior measurable, and prove a change is safe across the whole fleet before it ships worldwide
- Use operational and product metrics to decide what to fix, what to build, and what to stop doing
- Organize the team's work so priorities, commitments, and progress are visible to the team and its partners; forecast dates you can defend, and re-plan when the fleet or the program moves them
- Balance technical leadership and business judgment on long-term technology decisions, and represent the team in business planning, technical estimation, and the written documents that set direction
A day in the life
No two days look the same. You might start one-on-one with a couple of engineers, working through how they're doing and what they need to grow. Later you're writing up your team's long-term strategy without dropping the short-term commitments. After lunch you sit down to re-plan the next two weeks, because a hardware change just moved what's possible. Then your team pulls you into a deep dive: something's happening at one site, on a handful of robots out of the thousands there, and nobody yet knows if it's software, hardware, or the first sign of something bigger. They want tactical leadership, and you don't disappoint — you get them the data and a plan, and they spring into action. You close the day finding a way to recognize the people who made it great.
About the team
We are a group of super-smart, collaborative doers who keep the world's largest robot fleet moving and build the robots that will join it. We work shoulder to shoulder with the mechanical, electrical, and manufacturing engineers who build those robots, and with the operations teams who live with what we ship. We take our responsibility for safety seriously, but challenge ourselves to produce the right product that also gives us the performance we need. We pay attention to the details so others don't have to, and we let the data tell us where to look next.
