Software Development Engineer, Hydro

Description

Want to help advance the state of the art in open source distributed programming, AI agents and scalable systems? We’re looking for engineers to join the leaders of the open source Hydro framework for Rust, solving novel problems at the intersection of distributed systems and AI. Much like Rust originally guaranteed memory safety, Hydro provides distributed safety: compile-time checks that prevent a wide class of distributed bugs.

The Hydro team is working with novel compiler, AI and distributed systems technologies—including deep integrations with the Rust type system, formal verification techniques, agentic code generation and distributed system optimizations. As a member of this team, you will work on developing novel features for Hydro driven by our customers, in collaboration with the open source community and research partners. Challenges remain in compiler design, distributed-aware AI agent design and distributed systems engineering—all while meeting AWS’s exacting standards for scale, reliability, and security.

Your impact will be immediate and visible in both open source and coding agents. You'll ship features that directly improve how developers work. You can expect to engage with AWS-internal customers from critical cloud services, and external customers as well. From day one, you'll have opportunities to lead—whether that's owning projects, defining technical direction, or shaping how the team operates.

This is your chance to work with the next generation of technologies for intelligent, cloud-scale software engineering.

You’ll work on the open source Hydro framework and its integration with Amazon’s Kiro family of coding agents. Working directly with customers running some of the world’s biggest distributed systems, you’ll uncover real-world development challenges and translate them into product capabilities—staying true to Amazon’s customer‑obsessed approach. You’ll build and deploy novel software engineering technology, advancing the safety, reliability and simplicity of building the cloud‑scale software our customers demand.

Your responsibilities span the full lifecycle: from compiler technologies to agent training and steering to scalable deployment. You’ll balance innovation with operational excellence, making technical choices that enable Hydro open source and Kiro agents to work smoothly for a wide class of developers while meeting AWS’s standards for scale and security.

You will engage with teammates on software engineering in Hydro, engage with internal customers to enable their success using Hydro, and engage with open‑source users and contributors publicly.

You’ll join a team that bridges novel research and production engineering. We collaborate closely with UC Berkeley’s Hydro research group, where the framework originated, maintaining strong ties to the academic community while building commercial‑grade software. Our team culture emphasizes open source collaboration—you’ll work directly with external contributors, engage with the broader Rust community, and help shape the future of distributed programming in the open.

We value both deep technical expertise and the ability to translate research innovations into practical tools that developers love.

• 5+ years of non‑internship professional software development experience

• 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience

• 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

• 3+ years working on concurrent, parallel or distributed systems OR 3+ years working on compilers (LLVM, GraalVM, etc.) or modern build tools (Nix, Bazel, etc.)

• 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent

• Fluency in Rust

• • Experience building complex software systems that have been successfully delivered to…