Amazon moves millions of packages daily through a global logistics network of Fulfillment Centers, Sort Centers, and Delivery Stations. Every facility has a trailer yard — the physical space where line-haul vehicles arrive, get loaded or unloaded, and depart. Tracking what's happening in these yards in real time (which trailers are where, what state they're in, who's arriving and departing) is a hard problem that sits at the intersection of physical operations and software systems. The Relay Yard Automation (RYA) team builds the software that manages these trailer yards across 6,000+ Amazon facilities on three continents. Our products handle 200K+ gate transactions per day and facilitated the arrival and departure of 55M vehicles last year. We integrate computer vision, RFID, GPS, ultrasonic sensors, and IoT edge devices to automate what were historically manual, associate-staffed processes, from gate check-in/check-out to in-yard trailer movements. Our gate automation program has already eliminated millions of manual transactions, with a long-term goal of fully autonomous yard operations. The tech stack is diverse by necessity: Android mobile apps for yard associates and drivers, React web applications for remote gate agents and yard operators, Java/ TypeScript backend services on AWS, and hardware integrations running on edge compute devices deployed in the field. Systems are loosely coupled, event-driven, and must operate reliably in environments ranging from 1M+ sq ft North American fulfillment centers to small urban European delivery stations.

As a Senior SDE on this team, you will lead the design and implementation of our most complex and ambiguous technical initiatives. You will own architecture decisions for team-level systems, write critical-path code, and drive projects from problem definition through production launch. The role requires someone who can operate across the full stack, integrate with physical sensor systems at the edge, and make pragmatic trade-offs between delivery speed and long-term extensibility. You will influence technical direction across partner teams in Transportation Technology, raise the engineering bar through design reviews and exemplary artifacts, and mentor junior engineers. You will own operational excellence for the services you build — tier-1 systems where your decisions directly impact driver experience and Amazon's ability to meet customer delivery promises.

Key job responsibilities
- Design and implement software for yard and gate automation products across tier-1 systems. Your code runs in production where defects directly impact driver experience and customer delivery promises.

- Lead large projects end-to-end: define the technical approach in ambiguous problem spaces, decompose work into parallel workstreams, and deliver cohesive launches.

- Own system architecture for your team's services. Proactively simplify code, resolve architecture deficiencies, and remove bottlenecks across Java backend services, TypeScript/React web apps, Android mobile apps, and IoT edge devices.

- Make short-term vs. long-term trade-off decisions and communicate them clearly to your team and stakeholders.

- Integrate with physical systems — RFID readers, computer vision cameras, ultrasonic sensors, GPS — running on edge compute in variable warehouse environments. Debug problems that span hardware and cloud software.

- Own operational excellence for services you build: monitoring, alarming, runbooks, incident response, and root-cause corrective actions.

- Influence technical direction beyond your team through design reviews with partner teams across Transportation Technology.

- Act as a force multiplier. Raise the engineering bar through code reviews, design artifacts, and reusable frameworks. Mentor junior engineers toward their next level.