Software Development Engineer II, CloudFront Routing

Job Overview

Amazon Cloud Front is Amazon’s global content delivery network, delivering content from 400+ edge locations across 90+ cities in 48 countries. Cloud Front accelerates static and dynamic web content, video streaming, APIs, and software distribution for customers ranging from startups to the world’s largest media companies. It handles live events at scale—Thursday Night Football, FIFA World Cup, Prime Video—where milliseconds of latency and seconds of availability directly impact customer experience.

We are the Routing & Capacity Engineering team within Cloud Front, building the systems that decide which POP serves each request: DNS traffic steering, real‑time load measurement, latency‑based routing algorithms, and capacity planning. When a viewer in Tokyo presses play, our systems determine in milliseconds which edge location will serve that stream. We operate at the intersection of distributed systems, networking, and data engineering, solving problems such as optimizing traffic placement when latency, capacity, and cost pull in different directions, and reacting to network events that shift traffic patterns across a continent.

• Want to build systems that operate at global scale with visible customer impact
• Comfortable with ambiguity—solving problems that arrive as “traffic isn’t behaving right,” not as pre‑defined specs
• Curious about networking, CDN architecture, and how the internet actually works
• Think about scale—real‑time decisions across hundreds of locations and dozens of signals
• Learn fast and help others grow

• Design and build real‑time distributed systems and algorithms that determine how Cloud Front routes traffic across hundreds of edge locations
• Own data pipelines end‑to‑end—real‑time load measurement, latency collection, and traffic placement signals from design through production operations
• Author design documents, lead technical reviews, and drive architectural decisions for your area
• Investigate routing anomalies by tracing traffic decisions through multiple system layers to root cause
• Collaborate with networking, capacity planning, and DNS teams to improve customer outcomes
• Drive operational excellence: monitoring, alerting, automation, and runbooks
• Participate in on‑call rotations, responding to incidents with sound judgment
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design guidance, and hands‑on problem solving

You design and build the systems that decide where Cloud Front routes traffic. One week you build a new real‑time pipeline that measures load across hundreds of POPs and feeds routing decisions at sub‑second latency. The next you implement an algorithm that places prefixes onto ACE devices using latency experiment data, increasing cache utilization by double digits. You author design docs, lead reviews, ship code, and validate results in production.

When routing doesn’t behave as designed, you dig in—but the core of the role is building new systems and improving existing ones, not firefighting. You work across data pipelines, routing algorithms, and distributed infrastructure at global scale.

The Cloud Front Routing & Capacity Engineering team owns how Cloud Front routes traffic across 400+ edge locations. We build the systems that decide which POP serves each request, balancing latency, capacity, and cost in real time. Our stack spans DNS traffic steering, real‑time load measurement pipelines, latency‑based routing algorithms, and capacity planning for live events like Thursday Night Football, FIFA World Cup, and IPL.

Routing decisions here execute in milliseconds, directly determining streaming quality for end users worldwide.

• 3+ years of non‑internship professional software development experience
• 2+ years of non‑internship design or architecture experience of new and existing systems
• 1+ year of software development engineer or related occupational experience
• 1+ year of designing and developing large‑scale, multi‑tiered, multi‑threaded, embedded or distributed software applications using C#, C++, Java, or Perl
• 1+ year of Object Oriented Design experience
• Bachelor’s degree or foreign…