Software Development Manager, Agentic Proxy Bidding

Company: Amazon
Location: Palo Alto
Posted on: April 1, 2026

Job Description:

The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through industry leading generative AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences, bridging human creativity with artificial intelligence to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle from ad creation and optimization to performance analysis and customer insights. We are a passionate group of innovators dedicated to developing responsible and intelligent AI technologies that balance the needs of advertisers, enhance the shopping experience, and strengthen the marketplace. If you're energized by solving complex challenges and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI, join us in shaping the future of advertising. We are seeking an exceptional Software Development Manager to lead the Agentic Proxy Bidding team within the Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB) organization in Amazon Ads. This is a high-impact leadership role at the intersection of artificial intelligence, large-scale distributed systems, and advertising technology, where you will drive the development of intelligent, hands-off controls that revolutionize how advertisers achieve their business objectives. In this position, you will lead a team building sophisticated autonomous bidding systems that process billions of advertising transactions daily across Amazon's tier-1 infrastructure. Your team's work directly impacts advertiser success by leveraging highly advanced techniques including predictive modeling, generative AI, control theory, agent-based reinforcement learning, and advanced optimization methods to automatically adjust bids in real-time without advertiser intervention. This autonomous approach enables advertisers to focus on strategy while our systems handle the complex, millisecond-by-millisecond bidding decisions that maximize their return on investment. The technical challenges are substantial: you'll be architecting systems that must maintain low latency while processing massive scale, incorporating multiple ML models that learn and adapt continuously, and ensuring rock-solid reliability for a mission-critical advertising platform that generates significant revenue for Amazon and its advertisers. Your solutions must balance competing objectives—advertiser goals, marketplace dynamics, customer experience, and system constraints—all while operating autonomously with appropriate guardrails and explainability. Beyond the technical complexity, this role offers the opportunity to shape the future of advertising at Amazon. As autonomous systems become increasingly sophisticated, your team's innovations will define how advertisers interact with Amazon Ads, potentially reducing manual campaign management from hours per week to minutes per month. You'll be building the foundation for truly autonomous advertising—systems that understand advertiser intent, adapt to market conditions, and deliver measurable business outcomes without constant human oversight. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in both machine learning systems and large-scale distributed computing, combined with proven leadership in building and scaling high-performing engineering teams. You should be equally comfortable discussing reinforcement learning algorithms with applied scientists, system architecture with senior engineers, and business impact with product leaders. This role requires someone who can balance innovation with operational excellence, move fast while maintaining quality, and inspire teams to solve problems that have never been solved before. Key job responsibilities - Define long term vision and product strategy for bidding systems for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands - Lead the end-to-end architecture, design, and implementation of autonomous bidding systems processing billions of advertising transactions daily with high availability, low latency, and strict SLA requirements - Drive technical decisions around predictive modeling approaches, generative AI integration, multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms, control theory applications, and real-time optimization methods for autonomous bid adjustment - Ensure system scalability, reliability, and performance for tier-1 production services handling mission-critical advertising workloads across multiple AWS regions - Establish engineering best practices for ML operations (MLOps), including model training pipelines, A/B testing frameworks, continuous deployment, monitoring, and automated rollback mechanisms - Design fault-tolerant systems with appropriate circuit breakers, fallback strategies, and graceful degradation to maintain advertiser trust during system anomalies - Balance technical debt with feature velocity, making strategic decisions about when to refactor versus when to iterate - Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of software engineers and and applied scientists working on advanced autonomous systems and agentic AI - 3 years of engineering team management experience - 7 years of working directly within engineering teams experience - 3 years of designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience - 8 years of leading the definition and development of multi tier web services experience - Knowledge of engineering practices and patterns for the full software/hardware/networks development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, certification, and livesite operations - Experience partnering with product or program management teams - Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and senior leadership to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical designs, and product strategy - Experience in recruiting, hiring, mentoring/coaching and managing teams of Software Engineers to improve their skills, and make them more effective, product software engineers Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status. Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner. The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits . USA, CA, Palo Alto - 212,700.00 - 287,700.00 USD annually

Keywords: Amazon, Lodi , Software Development Manager, Agentic Proxy Bidding, Engineering , Palo Alto, California