Senior Software Development Engineer, AWS ElastiCache

This is an opportunity to join one of AWS's most foundational and high‑impact engineering teams – the Data Plane team within Amazon Elasti Cache and MemoryDB. We own the core in‑memory engine that powers millions of customer workloads: the data path, durability layer, replication protocol, snapshot system, and advanced data structures. Our work sits at the intersection of systems programming, database internals, and performance engineering – every microsecond matters when you're serving the world's most latency‑sensitive applications.

As a Software Development Engineer on the Data Plane team, you will take on broad ownership of the core engine that sits at the heart of Elasti Cache and MemoryDB.

• Designing and building the next‑generation in‑memory database engine, delivering sub‑millisecond latencies and millions of operations per second to the world's most demanding applications.
• Developing large‑scale distributed in‑memory storage systems in C/C++, extending open‑source Valkey with durability, replication, and advanced data structure capabilities.
• Building and optimizing the durability layer – transaction logging, snapshotting, and replication protocols – that enables MemoryDB to deliver in‑memory speed with Multi‑AZ data protection.
• Designing and implementing advanced data structures and query capabilities including vector search and full‑text search to support emerging workloads like generative AI.
• Driving performance engineering at the systems level – memory allocator tuning, I/O path optimization, and lock‑free concurrency – to push throughput and latency boundaries.
• Contributing to active‑active replication and conflict‑resolution mechanisms that enable globally distributed, low‑latency data access.
• Mentoring and growing engineers on the team, serving as a technical leader and role model for engineering best practices.
• Managing individual project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables with a high degree of autonomy and accountability.

Day‑to‑day, you can expect a dynamic mix of deep technical work and collaborative engineering. A typical week might look like:

• Writing and reviewing production‑quality C/C++ code for the core in‑memory engine – optimizing data structures, replication paths, and the durability layer for maximum throughput at minimal latency.
• Participating in design reviews and architecture discussions, debating trade‑offs around durability guarantees, memory efficiency, and replication consistency – and then implementing solutions.
• Collaborating with peer engineers to debug complex systems issues at the engine level – analyzing crash dumps, tracing memory corruption, and profiling hot paths under production‑scale load.
• Working with upstream open‑source Valkey contributors and internal partner teams to integrate new capabilities and ensure our extensions remain compatible and performant.
• Engaging with product teams to understand emerging customer needs – from generative AI workloads requiring vector search to globally distributed applications needing active‑active replication – and translating those into engine capabilities.
• Mentoring engineers through code reviews, design feedback, and pairing sessions, helping them grow their systems programming skills and engineering judgment.
• Contributing to the team's operational excellence by participating in on‑call rotations and driving improvements to engine reliability and diagnostic tooling.

The Data Plane team is a passionate group of engineers who thrive on solving hard problems at the intersection of database internals and distributed systems. We are collaborative, intellectually curious, and value technical depth, ownership, and a bias for action. We own the core engine behind Amazon Elasti Cache and MemoryDB – the in‑memory data path, durability layer, replication protocol, and advanced query capabilities that hundreds of thousands of AWS customers depend on for their most latency‑sensitive workloads.

• 5+ years of non‑internship professional software development experience.
• 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience.
• 5+ years of…