Senior Software Development Engineer, AWS DynamoDB

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS Database Services provides a broad range of purpose-built database services for any scale. Whether you need relational, key-value, document, in-memory, graph, time series, wide column, or ledger databases, AWS has the right database for your needs. As a member of the AWS Database organization, you'll support the development and management of database services that power millions of active customers and handle trillions of transactions. 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