Software Development Engineer, AWS DynamoDB

Description

AWS Utility Computing (UC) provides product innovations - from foundational services such as Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), to consistently released new product innovations that continue to set AWS's services and features apart in the industry. As a member of the UC organization, you'll support the development and management of Compute, Database, Storage, Internet of Things (Iot), Platform, and Productivity Apps services in AWS, including support for customers who require specialized security solutions for their cloud services.

Do you want to work on a product that can do the following?:

Access petabytes of data in single-digit milliseconds

Replicate tables across continents

Stream terabytes of data updates per hour continuously

Back up hundreds of terabytes of data in seconds

Encrypt petabytes of data with no performance degradation

Amazon DynamoDB is a No

SQL database service that does all this and more. DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit-millisecond performance at any scale. DynamoDB can store petabytes of customer data and handle peaks of more than 20 million requests per second.

As a fast growing service at the core of the AWS Cloud, our business and engineering decisions have widespread impact across AWS, Amazon, and beyond. Many of the world's fastest growing businesses, such as Lyft, Airbnb, and Redfin, as well as enterprises, such as Samsung, Toyota, and Capital One, depend on the scale and performance of DynamoDB to support their mission-critical workloads.

DynamoDB is one of the largest distributed database systems in the world, and we continue to believe it is Day 1 for the DynamoDB business. We are constantly improving and adding new capabilities to DynamoDB, and we are looking for a deeply technical, team-first software development engineer to push DynamoDB even further.

DynamoDB engineers are constantly challenged to think of unique and innovative solutions. The quality bar is high. As an engineer here, you will work on the hardest engineering problems in distributed systems at a massive scale and on multiple dimensions. You will exercise your intellectual curiosity, work with motivated teams of sharp individuals, and get insightful guidance from senior and principal engineers.

This is a hands-on position in which you will own everything from end to end: requirements gathering, designs, design reviews, implementations, code reviews, incremental feature launches, operations, mentoring, and the driving of continuous improvement.

Key job responsibilities

Design, build, and operate distributed infrastructure systems that provision, bootstrap, and manage the DynamoDB test cluster fleet. Specifically:

Own systems end-to-end. Take a problem from design through implementation, deployment, and ongoing operation. No handoffs - you build it, you run it, you improve it based on production data.

Deliver independently with minimal guidance. Break down ambiguous problems into executable plans. Your manager sets direction; you figure out the how and drive to completion.

Debug complex distributed systems issues. Trace failures across multiple services, accounts, and regions. Identify root causes - not just symptoms - and fix them structurally.

Write production-quality code in Python and Java. Ship weekly. Maintain high standards for testing, monitoring, and operational readiness.

Operate the fleet on-call. Triage tickets, respond to alarms, and use what you learn operationally to drive reliability improvements back into the systems.

Collaborate across teams. Engage partner teams to unblock dependencies, review designs, and align on technical approaches. Communicate clearly in writing and in person.

Influence technical direction. Propose improvements, write design docs, and participate in architecture decisions. You're expected to have opinions backed by data and advocate for them.

Mentor junior engineers and interns. Review code, give constructive feedback, and help others grow.

In short:
You will be a self-sufficient engineer who can independently own a major workstream, operate what they build, and make the engineers around them more effective.

A day in the life

Your morning starts with a message: "My test environment won't come up." By 10am you've traced a deployment failure to a race condition between two services, shipped a fix, and unblocked a team of engineers whose pipeline is green again.

By noon, you're designing automation that lets any…