Senior Software Development Engineer, Data Center Builder Tools

The Data Center Builder Tools team is looking for a seasoned, self-directed Senior Software Development Engineer to lead the design and evolution of the real-time middleware and runtime platform that powers industrial control systems across AWS Data Centers worldwide. Contribute to Amazon's vision of developing the safest, most secure, reliable, and efficient data centers on Earth. As a Senior Software Development Engineer (SDE III) on this team, you will set the technical direction for the software that sits between industrial hardware and the cloud, a unified, real-time data plane that lets control applications, device drivers, and cloud services exchange data reliably on industrial computing hardware. This is deep systems work at the boundary of software and hardware: you will own the architecture of the runtime, the communication layer, and the protocol and cloud integrations that the entire platform is built on, and you will be the engineer others turn to for the hardest problems in real-time, distributed, and embedded systems. In this role you will Own the architecture: of the real-time middleware and runtime, the data-exchange layer, canonical type system, and communication patterns (publish/subscribe and request/reply) that connect distributed control applications across languages and hardware and drive it through multiple iterations as requirements scale. Set technical strategy: for how the platform integrates with industrial automation platforms and hardware protocols (e.g. IEC 61131-3, EtherCAT, PROFINET, Modbus, OPC-UA, IO-Link) and how new device drivers are built, so the platform scales to many protocols without bespoke effort. Define the edge-to-cloud contract: how telemetry, metrics, and commands flow between devices and AWS services, with the right delivery guarantees, quality-of-service, and failure semantics for each class of data. Solve the defining hard problems: of a system where correctness means both the right result and the right timing, bounded latency, determinism, resource constraints on embedded hardware, and graceful degradation when connectivity is lost. Multiply the team: establish engineering standards, mentor SDE I/IIs and raise the bar in hiring, reviews, and design, and align hardware, controls, security, and operations partners around a shared technical vision. If you're excited by low-level systems, real-time data movement, and connecting physical equipment to the cloud at scale and by being the technical leader who makes it happen this is the role for you. Key job responsibilities As an SDE III on this team, you are a technical leader accountable for the architecture and long-term health of the runtime and middleware platform, not just individual components. You will operate across multiple workstreams and teams, make the consequential design decisions, and remain deeply hands-on where it matters most. Your primary responsibilities will include: Architecting the platform, not just components: owning the end-to-end design of the runtime and real-time middleware across embedded/edge controllers and the cloud, making the durable decisions on type systems, serialization, memory layout, schema evolution, and communication patterns that everything else depends on. Driving multi-quarter technical strategy: defining the roadmap for the next iteration of "What comes next", industrial protocol support, and cloud integration, sequencing the work, and making explicit build-vs-buy and short-term-vs-durable tradeoffs with the data to back them. Owning real-time correctness at system scale: reasoning about latency budgets, throughput, determinism, and failure modes across a distributed system adjacent to physical control loops, and setting the standards that keep those guarantees intact as the system grows. Leading cross-team and cross-discipline efforts: turning ambiguous, org-level requirements into clear technical direction, and aligning hardware, controls, security, and operations partners (and