Principal, Senior Principal and Distinguished Engineer, AWS Database Services

Principal, Senior Principal and Distinguished Engineer, AWS Database Services

Job  |  Services LLC

You've spent your career solving hard problems. Here's one worth your next decade.

The database is the heartbeat of every application ever built, and at AWS, we don’t just run databases – we reinvent them. Our database products collectively serve hundreds of millions of workloads, process trillions of transactions, and store some of the most critical data on earth – making us the database infrastructure of the internet. AWS Database Services is a $17B+ business and one of the fastest‑growing parts of AWS, where the challenges are not incremental, the scale is real, and the stakes are genuinely high.

Three forces are reshaping this landscape: AI‑assisted development, agentic AI, and the collapse of the boundary between operational and analytical data. You will be at the center of all three – as an architect and builder, not just an observer – shaping products used by millions of real customers.

• Amazon Aurora & RDS – The world’s most widely deployed managed relational databases.
• Amazon DynamoDB – A single‑digit millisecond No
  
  SQL engine at planetary scale.
• Amazon Document DB – MongoDB‑compatible document storage built for the cloud.
• Amazon Neptune – Graph database powering knowledge graphs, fraud detection, and recommendation engines.
• Amazon Elasti Cache & MemoryDB – In‑memory data stores where microseconds matter.
• Amazon Timestream – Purpose‑built time‑series for IoT, Dev Ops, and industrial telemetry.
• Amazon Keyspaces – Serverless Cassandra‑compatible storage at AWS scale.

• Define architecture for services that cannot go down, cannot lose data, and must scale to meet demand that grows faster than most companies ever see.
• Drive technical strategy across your service area, shaping roadmap, investment decisions, and the direction of engineering teams.
• Solve distributed‑systems problems, consistency models, performance cliffs, and failure modes that lack textbook answers.
• Build, prototype, and ship – from early‑stage experiments to production systems trusted by the world’s largest enterprises.
• Raise the bar for engineers through design reviews, mentorship, and high‑level technical judgment.
• Engage directly with customers running critical workloads and translate lessons into better architecture.
• Invent – evaluate emerging technologies, prototype new approaches, and push the boundaries of managed database services, including how AI reshapes database construction, query, and operation.

• Track record of technical decisions that held up at scale, under pressure, and over time.
• Instinct to build first: prototype to learn, ship to validate, and iterate without waiting for perfect conditions.
• Ability to influence without authority and earn trust through technical credibility.
• Experience working across organizational boundaries to drive outcomes no single team could achieve alone.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and a bias toward action.
• Curiosity about how AI is changing how engineers build on and with databases, and the drive to be ahead of that curve.

• expertise in one or more of: distributed systems, database internals, storage engines, query optimization, replication protocols, consensus algorithms, or high‑performance systems.

Amazon is an equal‑opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Base salary range varies by location. Amazon also offers sign‑on payments, restricted stock units, and a comprehensive benefits package, including health insurance, 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more at Amazon Benefits.