Senior Engineering Manager, Strands, AWS Velocity Labs

Senior Software Development Manager

Strands Agents is AWS's open source SDK for building production AI agents — a model-driven framework downloaded over 14 million times. We are looking for a Senior Software Development Manager to lead the Strands team, own the technical strategy, scale the engineering organization, and grow the open source community. This is a high-visibility role at the intersection of AI/ML innovation, developer tools, and open source — you'll define how AWS enables developers worldwide to build autonomous AI agents.

Lead the vision and execution for the Strands Agents SDK

Build and scale a world-class engineering team delivering the core agentic loop, multi-agent orchestration, and observability

Drive open source community growth, partner engagement, and ecosystem expansion

Represent Strands to customers, partners, and developers

Key job responsibilities

Own the roadmap, delivery, and operations for the Strands Agents SDK spanning the agentic loop, tool ecosystem, multi-agent orchestration, observability, and deployment patterns.

Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing engineering organization, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and speed.

Drive open source community strategy including contributor experience, governance, ecosystem expansion (MCP servers, model providers, integrations).

Partner with senior leaders across AWS (Kiro, Amazon Quick, Bedrock, Sage Maker) and external partners (Anthropic, Meta) to align roadmaps and co-develop capabilities.

Set and raise the technical bar — establish AI-assisted development workflows, drive architectural decisions, and ensure the framework remains model-driven and developer-friendly.

Drive executive alignment through VP-level reviews, PR/FAQs, and strategic narratives positioning Strands within AWS's broader AI strategy.

Champion production readiness — own deployment toolkits, reference architectures, and observability patterns that take agents from prototype to production.

Represent Strands externally at conferences, in blog posts, and through direct customer engagement.

A day in the life

You'll split your time between strategic leadership and hands-on technical engagement. Mornings might include reviewing community PRs and contributor roadmaps, followed by architecture deep-dives with your engineering leads on multi-agent orchestration. Afternoons could involve partnering with Amazon Q Developer or Bedrock teams on integration work, presenting roadmap updates to VP-level stakeholders, or engaging directly with customers adopting Strands for production workloads.

You operate as the single-threaded owner for Strands across open source, product, and engineering.

About the team

The Strands team builds the open source toolkit for production AI agents  believe that as LLMs become increasingly capable at reasoning and tool use, agent development should become simpler — not more complex. Our model-driven approach lets the model do the planning while we provide the infrastructure to make it reliable, observable, and scalable. We work in the open, ship fast, and measure success by the community of developers building real-world agents with Strands.

We are part of AWS Velocity Labs.