Are you passionate about building software systems that operate at massive scale and directly impact millions of customers? As a Software Development Engineer III at Amazon, you will lead the design, development, and delivery of complex software solutions that span the full product lifecycle - from defining technical strategy to deployment and ongoing maintenance. In this role, you will tackle ambiguous, high-impact problems where the technology path forward is not yet defined, balancing competing constraints to deliver solutions that are performant, extensible, and secure. You will shape your team's architectural direction, mentor fellow engineers, and drive engineering best practices that raise the bar for quality across the organization. If you are a collaborative, creative engineer who thrives on solving hard problems and making systems simpler, we want to hear from you.
Our team provides the foundational services that every Amazon builder depends on to develop, deploy, and operate software from continuous deployment orchestration to testing infrastructure and configuration management. We ensure these services maintain parity, reliability, and security across all regions. Our team builds products and tools supporting the deployment experience and operations for Amazon Dedicated Clouds (ADCs) supporting U.S. Government agencies.
Developers at Amazon work on real world problems on a global scale, own their systems end-to-end, and influence the direction of our technology that impacts hundreds of millions customers around the world. Join a team of super smart, customer obsessed developers that think big and have fun.
The candidate selected must obtain and maintain a security clearance at the TS/SCI with polygraph level. Upon start, the selected candidate will be sponsored for a commensurate clearance for each government agency for which they perform AWS work
Key job responsibilities
- Lead the design and implementation of software systems consisting of multiple features, working across related teams to ensure solutions are well-architected, scalable, and maintainable.
- Own your team's technical direction by evaluating trade-offs between short-term delivery needs and long-term architectural health, and by guiding future technology choices with context and clarity.
- Drive engineering best practices across the team, including code quality standards, operational excellence through alarms, telemetry, and runbooks, and effective retrospective processes.
- Mentor and develop engineers on your team and across the organization by providing technical guidance, career coaching, and constructive feedback that strengthens the broader engineering community.
- Collaborate with cross-functional partners to work backwards from customer needs, identify the right problems to solve, and deliver incremental, high-quality software that creates measurable value.
A day in the life
You start your morning reviewing the latest operational metrics and addressing any alerts from overnight. Mid-morning, you join a design review where you help a teammate refine the architecture for a new feature, asking the right questions to uncover hidden dependencies. After lunch, you pair with an engineer to work through a tricky implementation challenge, then shift to writing a technical design document for an upcoming project. Throughout the day, you balance hands-on coding with guiding your team toward pragmatic, well-reasoned solutions.
About the team
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor's degree, or CSSLP (Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional)
- 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
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
- 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- 5+ years of full stack development experience
- Experience with modern software development, web development frameworks, APIs
- 5+ years of distributed systems experience
The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
USA, VA, Herndon - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually
