What does it take to distribute billions of security credentials every day to every host across Amazon's infrastructure - without ever going down? That's the challenge at the core of this role.
As a Software Development Engineer on the AWS Credentials Distribution Systems (CreDS) team, you'll build and operate the IAM role credential distribution platform for Amazon's internal infrastructure - a tier-0 system that every single service team across the company depends on. Your work ensures that hosts receive short-lived, least-privilege credentials seamlessly, eliminating the operational burden of credential rotation at Amazon's scale. Your primary focus will be keeping this system secure, scalable, and resilient - designing for failure and driving automation. You'll also work backwards from internal customers to simplify credential management, building features and tooling that make adoption seamless and effortless for service teams.
Strong ownership and operational excellence are essential to succeed in this role. If you're passionate about distributed systems, cloud security, and building infrastructure that thousands of teams depend on every day, this is the role for you.
Key job responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate a tier-0 credential distribution system that serves every service team across Amazon's internal infrastructure
- Own and continuously improve system reliability, scalability, and security - proactively identifying risks and building mechanisms to prevent recurring issues
- Work backwards from internal customers to simplify credential management, building features and tooling that make adoption seamless and effortless
- Drive operational excellence through automation, monitoring improvements, and runbook development - reducing operational toil and improving mean time to resolution
- Collaborate with partner teams across Amazon to drive credential migration and adoption goals
- Troubleshoot and resolve complex distributed systems issues across multiple layers of the stack
- Participate in on-call rotations and contribute to incident response, root cause analysis, and corrective action follow-through
- Contribute to system design and architecture decisions, ensuring long-term scalability and maintainability
- Leverage AI tooling to improve engineering productivity, automate workflows, and raise the bar on operational efficiency
- Raise the bar for engineering quality through thorough code reviews, testing practices, and technical documentation
About the team
The AWS Credentials Distribution Systems (CreDS) team sits within AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) - the backbone of cloud security at Amazon. We own tier-0 services that distribute and manage ephemeral, least-privilege credentials across AWS compute platforms and Amazon's internal infrastructure.
We hold a high bar for system reliability, security, and scalability - backed by rigorous operational practices, thorough code reviews, and a bias toward automation. When an issue arises, we own it, learn from it, and build mechanisms to prevent it from recurring.
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
