Principal Technical Program Manager, AFT Quality

A fulfillment center can appear to be a chaotic place. With millions of items moving in and out of an area twice as large as your average theme park every day, a quick peek under the roof would reveal a manic scene. You would see associates, machinery, vehicles, robots, and packages flying about at break-neck speeds and accessing a breathtaking number of shelves and bins that store products. In reality, however, this activity is all highly organized and orchestrated by software, with each movement carefully planned and optimized. There are times when mistakes occur though, and products disappear, reappear in strange places, are damaged, or worse. When that happens, how does a fulfillment center operating at that size, speed, and scale recover gracefully and with minimal cost? How do we ensure that we meet our commitments to our customers and merchants? How do we find a needle in a haystack when we’re constantly shuffling the haystack around? And how do we do it at extreme scale in an environment of constant growth?

That’s where we come in, the AFT Quality team. Our goal is to prevent entropy in a system in which there are billions of transactions driven by human and robotic input across hundreds of millions of items every year. We must ensure that the virtual and physical state of the world is aligned inside hundreds of Amazon’s fulfillment centers globally. When our job is done well, mistakes are corrected quickly, and products are always ready to sell and ship.

We operate at a nexus of machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and healthy measure of hard-earned expertise in operations to build automated, algorithmic approaches to solving these problems at minimal cost. We create cutting edge software, building automated processes and workflows in the most complex operational problem space in the business world.

Key job responsibilities
-Define the strategy and roadmap for solving the complex, ambiguous problems that emerge throughout fulfillment operations, driving org-wide alignment on the path forward.
-Partner with customers and stakeholders to shape the requirements and specifications that define new product offerings from the ground up.
-Collaborate with scientists to apply state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technologies, including computer vision, to overcome challenges unique to the scale of the "everything store."
-Own the end-to-end delivery of large-scale programs that advance the organization's long-term goals of improving customer satisfaction and lowering costs.
-Lead high-stakes initiatives that cut across organizational boundaries, uniting disparate teams around a single outcome.
-Communicate initiative status and strategy to senior leadership and stakeholders, keeping them aligned and bought in.
-Engage with executives, principal engineers, managers, scientists, and product owners to drive resolution on contentious technical topics.
-Invent the mechanisms and metrics that turn ambiguous, complex initiatives into measurable, trusted impact.
-Understand system architectures deeply enough to challenge engineering teams, spot risks in technical proposals, and foster simplifications.
-Dive deep into the data or the code to unearth hidden opportunities and crack the toughest problems.
-Mentor TPMs and engineers, participate in promotions for senior employees, and contribute to talent development across the organization.

A day in the life
Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners and their children. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include:

• Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage
• Maternity and Parental Leave Options
• Paid Time Off (PTO)
• RRSP Plan

If you are not sure that every qualification on the list above describes you exactly, we'd still love to hear from you! At Amazon, we value people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets. If you’re passionate about this role and want to make an impact on a global scale, please apply!

About the team
Amazon Fulfillment Technologies (AFT) powers Amazon’s global fulfillment network. We invent and deliver software, hardware, and data science solutions that orchestrate processes, robots, machines, and people. https://tinyurl.com/AFTOverview

AFT’s Quality organmization drives automation programs that leverage computer vision, machine learning, and other innovative technologies to prevent, detect, and correct potential inventory issues impacting fulfillment efficiency and customer satisfaction. We build solutions that ensure Amazon customers can get what they want, when they want it and in perfect condition.