Sr. Software Development Engineer, Payroll Tax & Accounting Tech

Are you interested in building a high-performance, globally scalable gross-to-net payroll calculation engine with deep tax calculation capabilities that supports Amazon's current and future growth? Are you seeking an environment where you can drive innovation leveraging the scalability and innovation with Amazon's AWS cloud services? Do you have a passion for ensuring accurate financial calculations that directly impact employees? This is the job for you.

Amazon's Payroll Tax & Accounting Technology team is looking for a results-oriented, driven Senior Software Development Engineer who can help us create the next generation of distributed, scalable gross-to-net calculation infrastructure with sophisticated tax processing at its core. Our ideal candidate thrives in a fast-paced environment, enjoys the challenge of highly complex regulatory contexts that are typically being defined in real-time. We need someone to lead the technical design and develop a single global system that processes gross earnings through complex multi-jurisdiction tax calculations to net pay for millions of employees, with local configuration driven by our "policy as code" approach with LLM-based rule extraction.

A Senior Software Development Engineer (SDE) at Amazon works on real world problems on a global scale, owns their systems end to end and influences the direction of our technology that impacts hundreds of millions of customers around the world. You can expect to design flexible and scalable solutions, and work on some of the most complex challenges in large-scale computing by utilizing your skills in data structures, algorithms, and object oriented programming. Coming to Amazon gives you the opportunity to lead technical initiatives on a small development team in one of our many rapidly growing organizations.

You will learn all about how to design, implement and test highly scalable solutions using AWS cloud platform and its many products, in challenging agile projects, working with best in class professionals.

In this role you will:
- Lead the architecture and technical design of a globally deployed, locally configured gross-to-net calculation engine that leverages LLM-based rule extraction to formalize complex jurisdiction-specific tax regulations, including multi-layered tax calculations, YTD tracking, and statutory compliance requirements
- Design and develop deterministic tax calculation algorithms that handle employee withholding, employer tax obligations, and process gross earnings through deductions to calculate net pay across multiple countries
- Drive technical decisions for the LLM-based rule extraction pipeline and establish patterns for converting regulatory documents into executable "policy as code"
- Create accounting integration services that generate GL entries and journal entries for all necessary payroll entries, like earnings, tax, & benefits
- Implement GenAI shadow mode validation frameworks to ensure accuracy against existing systems
- Mentor engineers on the team and establish engineering best practices for deterministic financial calculations
- Partner directly with Software Development Engineers (SDEs), Technical Program Managers, tax specialists, and payroll operations teams to understand features and continuously identify opportunities to build and deploy software solutions

Key job responsibilities
- Lead the architecture and technical design for the global gross-to-net calculation engine with complex tax processing capabilities using the latest AWS technology in a large distributed environment
- Drive engineering excellence by defining and implementing engineering best practices for deterministic financial calculations and using data to define and improve operational best practices
- Own the technical direction and architecture choices for the LLM-based rule extraction pipeline and tax-centric gross-to-net calculation products
- Design, develop and deploy large-scale software solutions for Amazon's global payroll tax calculation and gross-to-net accounting needs
- Raise the bar on code quality, including security, auditability, readability, consistency, and maintainability across the team
- Leverage GenAI capabilities to build validation frameworks and continuously improve system accuracy
- Mentor and guide junior engineers on technical design, implementation approaches, and best practices

A day in the life
You'll start your morning leading technical discussions with tax specialists and payroll operations teams across multiple countries to understand jurisdiction-specific requirements and define system architecture. Mid-day, you'll design high-level system components, review code from team members, and architect deterministic tax calculation algorithms leveraging our "policy as code" approach with LLM-based rule extraction. You'll investigate how different countries structure their tax codes, exploring edge cases and regulatory nuances. Afternoons involve mentoring engineers, making key technical decisions on GenAI shadow mode validation frameworks, and refining accounting integrations. You'll tackle complex challenges like multi-layered tax calculations, YTD tracking, and ensuring sub-millisecond performance while maintaining 100% statutory compliance for millions of employees globally.

Basic Qualifications

- 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience, or Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
- 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team, or experience leading engineering teams as a mentor or tech lead
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

Preferred Qualifications

- 8+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Master's degree in computer science or equivalent
- Experience building complex software systems that have been successfully delivered to customers, or experience designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems
- Experience leading engineering teams as a mentor or tech lead, or experience leading the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems
- Experience in developing and deploying LLMs in production on GPUs, Neuron, TPU or other AI acceleration hardware, or experience in machine learning, data mining, information retrieval, statistics or natural language processing
- Experience in tax, finance or a related analytical field, or experience designing and implementing controls or experience performing audits over financial reporting environment

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