Software Development Engineer, Autoplay Experience

Autoplay And Short-Form Vending Engineer

The moment a customer opens Prime Video, something starts playing. That autoplay experience, the short video that begins before a customer even searches is one of the most influential moments in content discovery. Our team owns the systems that power it: the infrastructure that decides which trailer, promotional video, or short-form clip auto-plays for each customer, across every surface, device, and region Prime Video operates in.

We don't just power traditional autoplay. We also own Clips — Prime Video's newest TikTok-style vertical short-form video experience on mobile. Customers can now swipe through curated short clips of their favorite shows and movies, discovering content in an immersive, full-screen vertical format built for how people consume video today. This is Day 1 for short-form content discovery on Prime Video, and we're building the vending infrastructure that makes it possible.

You will own the end-to-end autoplay and short-form vending experience for hundreds of millions of customers. You will build the ranking and personalization systems that select the right video for each customer in real time, the scheduling and ingestion pipelines that bring promotional and clip content from teams worldwide into the vending system, and the low-latency serving infrastructure that delivers the right experience before a customer has finished scrolling. This is high-ownership, high-visibility engineering at Prime Video scale.

Key job responsibilities:

• Design, build, and own the systems that power autoplay and the new Clips short-form vertical video experience for hundreds of millions of customers across every Prime Video surface, device, and region
• Build and evolve the ranking and personalization systems that determine which trailer, promotional video, or short clip surfaces for each customer based on their taste, viewing history, and real-time context
• Own the scheduling and ingestion pipelines that bring promotional content and short-form clips into the vending system, ensuring freshness, correctness, and eligibility at scale
• Design and operate low-latency serving infrastructure that delivers autoplay and Clips vending decisions in milliseconds under strict availability constraints
• Build content compliance and maturity-gating guardrails to ensure every autoplay and short-form experience is safe and appropriate for the customer
• Own the full lifecycle of services you build — from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and operational excellence
• Run A/B experiments to measure the impact of personalization, content selection, and experience changes on customer engagement, content discovery, and streaming metrics
• Solve complex, ambiguous problems across distributed systems, real-time personalization, and short-form content delivery with minimal guidance
• Improve engineering practices across the team including CI/CD pipelines, testing frameworks, deployment patterns, and on-call processes
• Mentor engineers on system design, code quality, and operational best practices
• Collaborate with scientists, marketers, product managers, and partner teams to translate business objectives into well-scoped technical solutions and influence the technical roadmap

A day in the life:

You will independently own and deliver features across backend services, ranking pipelines, and real-time vending infrastructure that powers both the autoplay experience and the new Clips short-form video experience on Prime Video. You will take ambiguous problems, break them down, and drive them to production with minimal guidance. Day to day, you will write and review code, design and evolve system architectures with senior engineers, debug production issues during on-call rotations, and drive operational improvements at worldwide scale. You will collaborate with applied scientists, marketing campaign managers, and product managers, and mentor teammates through code reviews and design discussions.

About the team:

We are the Content Understanding team within Prime Video. We own two of the most customer-visible video experiences on the platform: the autoplay experience that starts the moment a customer opens Prime Video, and Clips - our newest TikTok-style vertical short-form video experience on mobile that lets customers swipe through curated clips of their favorite titles. Our mission is to make every browse moment count: surfacing the right trailer, promotional video, or short clip for each customer, across every Prime Video surface and device worldwide. We own the full stack scheduling and ingestion pipelines, personalization and ranking models, real-time vending services, and the guardrails that keep every experience safe and trustworthy. Engineers own systems end-to-end, make high-judgment decisions autonomously, and see their work reflected in engagement metrics the same week it ships. This is a Day 1 team for short-form content discovery at Prime Video scale.