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 NoSQL 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 engineer spin up a fully functional multi-region DynamoDB test environment with a single command - replacing what used to take a week of manual configuration. You're thinking about cross-region networking, security boundaries, and making complex infrastructure invisible to its users.
After lunch, you're debugging a circular dependency that's been silently generating tickets for months. You find it, fix it, and close an entire class of failures.
What makes this role different: You're building the infrastructure that lets every DynamoDB team validate their features before they ship to customers. When you make test environments faster and more reliable, you multiply the velocity of hundreds of engineers.
The problems are deeply technical - distributed systems orchestration, fleet management, cross-account security, credential rotation at scale - but you'll ship code every week and see immediate impact.
The team is small (6 engineers), the scope is large, and the ownership is real. You'll design, build, and operate entire systems end-to-end. You'll work with Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, CloudFormation, EC2 fleet management, IAM, Python, and Java. You'll use AI coding tools daily.
Every major DynamoDB launch validates on infrastructure your team builds. You make that possible.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- 1+ years of software development engineer or related occupational experience
- 1+ years of designing and developing large-scale, multi-tiered, multi-threaded, embedded or distributed software applications, tools, systems, and services using: C#, C++, Java, or Perl experience
- 1+ years of Object Oriented Design experience
- Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
- Experience programming with at least one software programming language
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- 3+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
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, WA, Seattle - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually
