Software Dev Engineer, S3 Request Plane (AWS)

Managing trillions of objects in storage, retrieving them in sub-x ms, building software that deploys to tens of thousands of hosts, achieving 99.999999999% (you didn’t read that wrong, that’s 11 nines!) durability. These are just a few of the numbers that give you a sense of the scale of the exciting problems you will find every day working in Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon S3 powers businesses across the globe that make the lives of consumers better daily. Whether its electronic content delivered to your home, technology that betters your remote working experience, allows you to plan travel to exotic places or simply get stuff delivered to your home.

As a Software Development Engineer in the S3 Replication team, you will work on Object Replication, S3 Tables Replication and other products, delivering services at scale to delight our customers and support the routing of billions of requests per minute to S3’s globally distributed server fleet. You will have the opportunity to design and develop one of the largest cross-region asynchronous systems in the world as well as learning modern data lake formats like Apache Iceberg. You will work alongside engineers and leaders who obsess about operations, performance, availability, scalability, and durability of customer data. Our services run at scale worldwide and as a member of this team, you will have the opportunity to ship code often, and see the impact your code has on a wide range of S3 customers.

Day to day you will be responsible for designing, delivering and maintaining the operational health of our services, maintaining our build & release systems, and ensuring maximum up-time for our developers and customers. You will provide coaching and mentoring for junior engineers and participate in design reviews, operations meetings and leadership discussions. You will work closely with the likes of Amazon Route 53, AWS EC2 and AWS Networking to achieve the combined goals of AWS and S3. You will transcend a single organization in order to deliver solutions that require broader integration across AWS. For this reason, thinking big and thinking outside of S3 is one of the key tenets you will have to practise on a daily basis.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Developing tools to streamline operations as we scale to reduce operational load and improve our overall operational posture. Influencing & driving operational excellence and best practices within the organization.
• Identifying ways to increase the automate and improve our test infrastructure and make our CI/CD more robust and flexible.
• Playing a key role in investigating and recommending best practices for maintaining and improving code quality, fleet health, and security & reliability of our service.
• Growing our talent through actively mentor junior system development engineers, improving their skills, their knowledge of our systems, and their ability to get things done.
• Sharing your knowledge with wider teams and writing clear and concise documentation to allow other system development engineers to get the most out of the service and tools.

Our team works together to provide work/life balance for all team members. We recognize that the circumstances of our team members vary, and we balance work across the team so that we’re all able to maintain high standards on behalf of our customers, while at the same time allowing for rich and happy personal lives.

In AWS, if you build it, you own it. S3 is a highly available 7x24 worldwide service requiring dedicated support from our engineering teams. We pride ourselves on a high level of ownership in the work we do. This means we hold a high bar for test automation, verification processes, design and code reviews to ensure that our systems meet the exacting standards our customers demand. We maintain a regular on-call rotation across our teams with engineers and managers all taking part to resolve the inevitable issues that arise. We work hard to minimize getting paged in the middle of the night as we recognize that a well-rested employee is a productive employee.

A day in the life

Upon joining S3, every employee is paired with a peer buddy who will help you to quickly come up to speed in understanding the technology we’re building, the tools we use and the business problems we’re trying to solve. We hire exceptional people and we recognize the importance of coaching others. We have a formal mentor search application that lets you find a mentor that works best for you based on location, job family, and job level. On our internal “Broadcast” video streaming website, you’ll find countless presentations by some of the brightest minds in computing discussing solutions to many of the exciting problems we’re solving in AWS today with new live-streaming videos added every week.

About the team

Diverse Experiences

Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.

Why AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses.

Work/Life Balance

We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.

Inclusive Team Culture

Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness.

Mentorship and Career Growth

We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.

Key job responsibilities

• Collaborate with experienced cross-disciplinary Amazonians to conceive, design, and bring innovative products and services to market.
• Design and build innovative technologies in a large distributed computing environment and help lead fundamental changes in the industry.
• Create solutions to run predictions on distributed systems with exposure to innovative technologies at incredible scale and speed.
• Build distributed storage, index, and query systems that are scalable, fault-tolerant, low cost, and easy to manage/use.
• Design and code the right solutions starting with broadly defined problems.
• Work in an agile environment to deliver high-quality software.

A day in the life

The challenges SDEs solve for at Amazon are big and influence millions of customers, sellers, and products around the world. We are looking for individuals who are passionate about creating new products, features, and services from scratch while managing ambiguity and the pace of a company where development cycles are measured in weeks, not years.

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
• - 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

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. As a total compensation company, Amazon's package may include other elements such as sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, basic life & AD&D insurance), Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP), Deferred Profit Sharing Plan (DPSP), paid time off, and other resources to improve health and well-being. We thank all applicants for their interest, however only those interviewed will be advised as to hiring status.