Software Development Engineer, Production and Post Production Technology

Software Development Engineer II – Amazon MGM Studios

Amazon MGM Studios is seeking a Software Development Engineer II to contribute to our Studio in the Cloud (SITC) platform. SITC is transforming entertainment content creation by moving all major production and post‑production workflows from traditional on‑premises infrastructure to AWS cloud‑based solutions. This initiative encompasses nine core workflows—Dailies, Editorial, VFX, Sound, Conform, Color, Mastering, QC/Delivery, and Remote Production—representing the complete content creation lifecycle from Original Camera Footage (OCF) ingestion through final delivery.

In this role, you will deliver working software features and improvements for critical SITC platform components. You may own features within workflows such as media transcoding optimization, file transfer acceleration, playback performance improvements, rendering job orchestration, or quality control automation. You will design and implement distributed systems that enable creative professionals to work globally using industry‑standard tools integrated on AWS. Your work will address difficult technical problems including efficient media processing at scale, reliable high‑bandwidth data transfer, responsive interactive workflows, and integration with creative tool vendors like Avid, Adobe, Color front, and Blackmagic.

As an SDE II, you will work autonomously on feature development, delivering across the full software lifecycle including working backwards from customers, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations. You will balance constraints and limit short‑term workarounds to create sustainable, maintainable solutions. You will seek guidance from your manager, SDE 3s, or Principal Engineers when facing trade‑offs, and participate in inclusive, constructive technical discussions with team members and adjacent teams.

Your systems will support Amazon MGM Studios' production slate spanning 150+ titles annually across International Originals and Global Originals.

This role requires solid technical skills in distributed systems, software development, and cloud infrastructure. You will implement solutions that handle large‑scale media data (productions generate 10‑50 TB each), maintain responsive performance for creative workflows, and integrate with complex vendor systems. Success requires writing high‑quality, well‑tested code that can be maintained and extended by others, while delivering features that directly impact the creative teams using SITC for their productions.

• Deliver working software features and improvements to major portions of the SITC platform components, including new development as well as refactoring and deprecation work for workflows such as media ingestion, transcoding, collaboration infrastructure, rendering orchestration, or delivery automation.
• Design software solutions to enable new features or improve existing systems, working with team leadership to ensure designs align with long‑term architectural strategy. May still require guidance on complex architectural decisions.
• Contribute significantly to the full software development lifecycle including scoping, design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance of the team's software. Work backwards from customers and stakeholders to understand business and customer value in order to deliver the right solutions.
• Work on difficult technical problems with visible risks or roadblocks, including optimizing media processing performance for large files (multi‑GB assets), implementing reliable data transfer across regions with varying network conditions, building responsive APIs for interactive creative tools, integrating with vendor systems that have specific technical requirements, and ensuring system reliability for productions that cannot tolerate failures.
• Write high‑quality production code that meets the Amazon Code Bar including well‑written implementations using language idioms correctly, maintainable logic that others can understand and extend, robust error handling, efficient resource usage, comprehensive testing, and operational visibility through logging and metrics.
• Act…