Key job responsibilities
- Design and build real-time distributed systems and algorithms that determine how CloudFront routes traffic across hundreds of edge locations
- Own data pipelines end-to-end: real-time load measurement, latency collection, and traffic placement signals from design through production operations
- Author design documents, lead technical reviews, and drive architectural decisions for your area
- Investigate routing anomalies by tracing traffic decisions through multiple system layers to root cause
- Collaborate with networking, capacity planning, and DNS teams to improve customer outcomes
- Drive operational excellence: monitoring, alerting, automation, and runbooks
- Participate in on-call rotations, responding to incidents with sound judgment
- Mentor engineers through code reviews, design guidance, and hands-on problem solving
A day in the life
You design and build the systems that decide where CloudFront routes traffic. One week you are building a new real-time pipeline that measures load across hundreds of POPs and feeds routing decisions at sub-second latency. The next you are implementing an algorithm that places prefixes onto ACE devices using latency experiment data, increasing cache utilization by double digits. You author design docs, lead reviews, ship code, and validate results in production. When routing doesn't behave as designed, you dig in - but the core of the role is building new systems and improving existing ones, not firefighting. You work across data pipelines, routing algorithms, and distributed infrastructure at global scale.
About the team
The CloudFront Routing & Capacity Engineering team owns how CloudFront routes traffic across 400+ edge locations. We build the systems that decide which POP serves each request, balancing latency, capacity, and cost in real-time. Our stack spans DNS traffic steering, real-time load measurement pipelines, latency-based routing algorithms, and capacity planning for live events like Thursday Night Football, FIFA World Cup, and IPL. Routing decisions here execute in milliseconds and directly determine streaming quality for end users worldwide.
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, CA, Santa Clara - 165,200.00 - 223,600.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Seattle - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually
