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 the SDM for this team, you will lead 6 SDEs and own the end-to-end delivery of RYA's product roadmap. You will partner with product managers, operations leaders, and peer engineering teams across Transportation Technology to define what to build next and ensure your team ships it. The role requires someone comfortable operating across the full stack, making architectural trade-off decisions with senior engineers, and translating ambiguous operational problems into scoped technical plans. You will own your team's operational health for tier-1 services that directly impact driver experience and Amazon's ability to meet customer delivery promises.


Key job responsibilities
- Own delivery of your team's roadmap: define milestones, allocate resources across 6 SDEs, track execution, and course-correct when plans slip.
- Hire, develop, and retain your team. Write performance evaluations, calibrate talent, and create growth plans that move each engineer toward their next level.
- Translate ambiguous business problems into scoped technical strategies with product and principal engineering partners. Decompose large initiatives into parallel workstreams.
- Make architectural trade-off decisions alongside your senior engineers — balancing delivery speed, technical debt, and long-term extensibility. You won't write production code daily, but you must understand the systems well enough to challenge designs and unblock decisions.
- Own operational health: availability, latency, alarming, on-call response, and post-incident corrective actions.
- Remove cross-team blockers. Influence peer teams and dependencies to align on shared timelines without positional authority.
- Represent your team in leadership reviews (OP1/OP2, business reviews). Write data-driven narratives that surface risks early and propose decisions.
- Build mechanisms that outlast individuals: runbooks, onboarding docs, deployment automation, and review processes that raise the team's baseline.