Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at Amazon Web Services?
Apply Now →Skills & Technologies
About This Role
DESCRIPTION
AWS operates the world's largest fleet of GPU-accelerated servers powering AI/ML workloads at cloud scale. Our team designs, builds, and operates this fleet — solving systemic hardware issues and building systems that detect and prevent recurrence so customers experience the highest quality of service.
We are seeking a Senior Technical Program Manager to drive end-to-end delivery of GPU-accelerated servers across our global fleet. You will coordinate cross-functional engineering teams spanning hardware, firmware, and software, manage ODM partnerships across multiple continents, and establish closed-loop quality systems that drive continuous improvements. This role requires technical depth to translate engineering constraints into program risk, combined with program management excellence to deliver complex hardware at global scale.
What You Will Do
You will own programs where the critical path runs through silicon, firmware, and software teams simultaneously. You will translate ambiguity into structure: turning a fleet telemetry signal into a corrective action plan with quantified failure rates, a customer requirement into a new platform milestone with EVT/DVT/PVT gates, or a manufacturing escape into a design change with updated validation criteria. You will drive decisions on program trade-offs — adjusting scope when qualification gates slip, balancing deployment speed against fleet risk, and determining when to accept interim mitigations instead of holding for root-cause fixes. When a large scale of GPU servers depend on your program landing on time, you are the one ensuring hardware readiness, qualification completeness, and operational handoff happen without gaps.
Why You Will Love It
The world's most advanced frontier models are trained on the platforms you help build. Your programs launch the GPU servers that power the largest AI/ML workloads on the planet. You will see your decisions reflected in fleet reliability metrics within weeks of deployment. The team is small and high-trust — you own programs end to end from concept through production, with direct access to leadership and engineering alike.
The Ideal Candidate
You have deep technical intuition across hardware and software — enough to challenge engineering decisions, not just track them. You thrive in ambiguity, bringing structure to programs where requirements, timelines, and dependencies are still forming. You align priorities across teams in different organizations, and you escalate with data, not noise. You actively mentor and develop others — TPMs and engineers alike. You contribute to hiring, promotion assessments, and raising the bar for program management practices in your organization.
Key job responsibilities
Strategy & Mechanisms
- Define program strategy, objectives, and success criteria; influence resource allocation and priority decisions across engineering workstreams to align with organizational goals
- Build and own mechanisms for program visibility — defining metrics, dashboards, and review cadences that enable data-driven decisions and early risk detection
- Streamline delivery processes across teams; identify and eliminate dependencies, redundant gates, or coordination overhead that slow velocity
Requirements & Planning
- Facilitate requirements gathering with internal customers; develop Technical Requirements Documents (TRDs) covering server specs, rack configurations, PCIe topology, power/cooling topology, and SKU definitions
- Build program timelines aligned to different phases (Program Initiation, Design, Qualification, Pilot, Post-launch) with critical path analysis, risk identification with new & unique changes to the hardware, and milestone tracking for the program.
- Drive Program Initiation reviews: scope definition, preliminary annualized failure rate predictions, resource planning, supply chain long-lead identification, and RFP (Request for Proposal) issuance to ODMs
Execution & Coordination
- Drive cross-functional alignment across hardware, firmware (BIOS, BMC, CPLD), software, and operations teams through design reviews, manufacturing readiness and production readiness for fleet deployment.
- Manage ODM partnerships: track EVT/DVT/PVT builds, manufacturing readiness gates, Bill of Materials (BOM) management in PLM systems, and quality checkpoints
- Identify blockers early, escalate dependencies before they impact critical path, and facilitate technical trade-off decisions across engineering workstreams.
- Communicate program status to leadership with clear reporting on milestone progress, risk posture, and mitigation plans.
Risk & Quality
- Challenge technical workstreams to surface risks early; quantify impact to schedule and reliability (annualized failure rate targets, availability SLAs) with proposed mitigations
- Drive root cause analysis of fleet-wide hardware failures and ensure corrective actions flow back into qualification criteria and design requirements
- Define acceptance criteria, coordinate qualification testing at server and rack levels, and manage go/no-go decisions for mission-critical AI/ML workloads
Transition
- Conduct knowledge transfer and document lessons learned; ensure operational readiness including automation, monitoring, and runbook completeness for production handoff
May require occasional (
A day in the life
You start the day syncing with ODM partners across time zones on build status and open engineering actions. Mid-morning, you run an engineering review connecting firmware, software, and hardware teams to unblock a qualification gate. In the afternoon, you triage a fleet reliability issue with operations data, drive alignment on corrective actions, and update executive stakeholders on program risk posture. You end the day reviewing NPI milestone readiness and ensuring the next design review has clear entry criteria.
About the team
The Hardware Engineering AI/ML UltraServer platform team is a group of engineers and technical program managers directly responsible for launching GPU-accelerated servers into the AWS fleet. Located in Seattle, Austin, and Cupertino, we collaborate with global development teams and ODM partners to deliver next-generation AI/ML infrastructure deployed in datacenters worldwide. We move fast with small, empowered teams delivering end-to-end — from server conception through fleet-scale operations.BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering or a related discipline or equivalent
- Experience managing programs across cross-functional teams, building processes and coordinating release schedules
- 6+ years of technical product or program management experience, working directly with multiple engineering teams.
- 5+ years of experience driving hardware development programs (servers, racks, networking, or storage) through full product lifecycle including design, validation, manufacturing, and fleet deployment
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related fields
- Experience leading the design, automation, deployment, and support of large-scale infrastructure
- Experience facilitating discussions with senior leadership regarding technical / architectural trade-offs, best practices, and risk mitigation
- 5+ years of experience coordinating complex server programs with ODM/JDM partners across multiple geographies, managing design reviews, manufacturing readiness gates, and quality checkpoints
- 5+ years of experience working with GPU/accelerator server platforms, NPI (New Product Introduction), or hardware qualification programs across various phases (EVT, DVT, PVT)
- Experience driving root cause analysis and corrective action processes for hardware reliability issues at fleet scale
- Knowledge of server hardware development lifecycle: electrical/mechanical design, firmware, thermal/power validation, and manufacturing testing.
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.
The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
USA, CA, Cupertino - 171,000.00 - 231,400.00 USD annually
USA, TX, Austin - 148,700.00 - 201,200.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Seattle - 148,700.00 - 201,200.00 USD annually
Salary Context
This $148K-$201K range is below the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $175K across 1356 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 8,943 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 75% of the market. At Amazon Web Services, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $212,000 based on 11,866 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $228,700. This role's midpoint ($174K) sits 17% below the category median. Disclosed range: $148K to $201K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($253,100) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,408; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $228,700; Director: $272,250; VP: $235,000.
Amazon Web Services AI Hiring
Amazon Web Services has 71 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, AI Product Manager, Research Engineer, Data Scientist. Positions span New York, NY, US, Bellevue, WA, US, Denver, CO, US. Compensation range: $97K - $299K.
Location Context
AI roles in Austin pay a median of $207,800 across 271 tracked positions. That's 3% below the national median.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 8,943 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 175 entry-level, 4,132 mid-level, 3,268 senior, and 1,368 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (521 positions). The remaining 8,351 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($253,100 median, 57 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 419 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 51 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 8,943 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,739), AI Product Manager (403), AI Software Engineer (402). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (175) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,132) and senior (3,268) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,368 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (521 positions), with 8,351 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,380. Top-quartile roles start at $264,148, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,310. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $253,100 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,422 postings), Aws (808 postings), Azure (638 postings), Rag (555 postings), Gcp (457 postings), Pytorch (433 postings), Claude (341 postings), Kubernetes (337 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
Get Weekly AI Career Intelligence
Salary data, skills demand, and market signals from 16,000+ AI job postings. Every Monday.