Job summary
Are you passionate about building highly-complex technical products that transform into simple, magical experiences in the hands of customers? Do you want to help drive more meaningful moments in the daily lives of our customers, be it for fun or in times of needs? Do you want to define a strategy that leverages the intelligence of Alexa’s AI to help customers engage with family, friends, extended family, and more broadly with people who share interests with them? Are you passionate about solving hard problems at the intersection of automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language understanding (NLU), digital communications, digital collaboration, and social media with solutions available across numerous voice-user-interface-forward, graphical-user-interface-forward, and multimodal surfaces?

The Alexa Connections team is reinventing the way customers communicate, collaborate, and share with their loved ones. Our products enable human-to-human connection, including audio and video calling, audio and video Drop In (intra and inter-household intercom), messaging, household collaboration (like family reminders and a family calendar), and sharing. Customers use our products to communicate, collaborate, and share with family, friends, and more. And, when something unexpected happens, customers trust us to help them call or message for help in cases of emergency reporting that “Alexa helped save my life.”

Come help us lead the future of how millions of customers communicate using Alexa, the fast-evolving voice assistant. We’ve only just started! We are looking for customer-obsessed owners who have an insatiable curiosity to make their customers daily lives better!


Key job responsibilities

As a Senior Technical Program Manager, you will engage with an experienced cross-disciplinary staff to conceive and design innovative consumer products. In this role, you will:

• Work with key stakeholders in product management and executive teams to define strategy and requirements
• Lead cross functional development on new technology from design through delivery
• Work with remote teams to deliver supporting software and services in sync with launch timelines
• Communicate regularly with senior management on status, risks and change control

The right candidate will possess a strong program management background, has experience leading large projects, and has a well-rounded technical background in current technologies. As a Sr. Technical Program Manager, your responsibilities will include writing specifications, driving project schedules from design to release, and managing the production launch. You will lead and coordinate design and implementation efforts, coordinating across multiple teams to develop optimal solutions. You will anticipate bottlenecks, provide escalation management, anticipate and make trade-offs, and balance the business needs versus technical constraints.

You must be able to thrive and succeed in an entrepreneurial environment, destroy limits to scale, and not be hindered by ambiguity or competing priorities. This means you are able to develop and drive high-level strategic initiatives while rolling up your sleeves to get the job done. This role will require high judgement on how we can deliver for customers in both the short- and long-term.

A day in the life

We are looking for a Senior Technical Program Managers to (1) partner with Product Managers (PMTs)/Engineers and develop delightful opportunities for people to interact, share information, keep up with others, and have fun; (2) build a suite of APIs to enable internal and external developers to build experiences which transcend a multitude of networks, driving engagement and monetization; (3) earn and maintain customer trust by ensuring our experiences are safe and inclusive places to interact, free from harassment.

About the team

Alexa is the name of the Amazon cloud-based voice service that powers the next generation of ambient computing devices, such as the Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show and more. We believe voice is the most natural user interface for interacting with technology. At Alexa Communications, we are inventing the future of global, multimedia communications.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience managing projects across cross functional teams, building sustainable processes and coordinating release schedules
• 7+ years of experience working directly with engineering teams
• 5+ years of technical program management experience

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, computer science or a related technical discipline.
• Technical program management developing interactive consumer applications and/or leading software development projects
• Experience coordinating cross functional and cross organizational teams in software development

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• An advanced technical degree or MBA
• Experience with communications products and protocols (IP messaging, voice, and video).
• Experience with speech-related hardware or software systems
• Previous work experience as a software developer
• Expertise in agile software engineering practices & best practices for the full software development life cycle, including agile estimation and planning, coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
• Knowledge of embedded computing, IoT, voice processing and/or web services fields.
• Demonstrated ability to engage multiple technical teams to drive consistent expectations towards a shared goal
• Track record for being detail- with a demonstrated ability to self-motivate and follow-through on projects
• Demonstrated ability to simultaneously manage multiple, fast-paced initiatives
• Strong organizational skills
• Strong interpersonal and excellent written and verbal communication skills