Director, Software Development - Language Foundations, Amazon SW Builder Experience

Amazon Software Builder Experience (ASBX), started in 2022, is working to make Amazon the best place to build software. Every day, hundreds of thousands of Amazon software builders rely on us for the tools they build with, and for the technology, training, and community behind them. One of our most important responsibilities is shaping the language ecosystem, both inside Amazon and across the open-source community, to improve the experience for every software builder.

The Role

We are seeking a Director of Software Development to lead Language Foundations, the organization that owns Amazon's programming-languages strategy across our strategic languages (Java, Rust, Python, TypeScript, Go, C/C++, Kotlin, and Swift) and represents that strategy to the language community: the engineers who specialize in language design, compilation, and optimization, along with standards bodies and the open-source ecosystems Amazon depends on. This leader recruits and leads some of the world's foremost language specialists, many of them Principal Engineers with deep standing in their fields.

Language Foundations shapes and influences the direction of the world's most critical programming languages. Amazon sits on the Rust Foundation board, is one of the distributors of OpenJDK (Amazon Corretto), and sponsors resident engineers who are among the top contributors in their communities. This leader is central to Amazon's large-scale language modernization, owning the tooling and language foundations that enable teams to move to modern languages and runtimes and transform the performance, efficiency, and safety of the software they run. It is simultaneously a community-shaping and an internal-modernization challenge: strengthening the ecosystems that Amazon and the industry rely on, while helping modernize some of the largest services in the world.

Key job responsibilities

● Own the vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmap for Language Foundations, connecting it to builder impact: code quality, reliability, security, performance, and the enablement of agent-supervised development.

● Deliver best-in-class support for Amazon's strategic languages (Java, Rust, Python, TypeScript, Go, C/C++, Kotlin, and Swift), aligning internal toolchains with industry conventions so builders and agents work on modern runtimes out of the box.

● Lead Amazon's language modernization through the tooling and language foundations that transform the performance, efficiency, and safety of the software teams build and run, including large-scale Rust and Java runtime investments.

● Build the trusted, secure repository for the third-party software Amazon depends on, curating out unmaintained and vulnerable dependencies so builders start from a safe default.

● Shape the external direction of strategic programming languages through Amazon's participation in standards bodies, foundations (e.g., the Rust Foundation, OpenJDK), and the open-source community, while maintaining the cultural norms of those communities.

● Lead and grow a multi-team engineering organization: recruit and develop world-class language specialists and Principal Engineers and build the leadership bench.

● Influence strategy and technical direction at the most senior levels of the company through clear written narrative and data; briefs at CEO-level reviews.