Sr. Systems Development Engineer, Region Services

Applicants must be Australian citizens and hold or be eligible to obtain an Australian Government Security Clearance with the ability to successfully complete an Organisational Suitability Assessment. For more information regarding security clearances please visit (https://www.agsva.gov.au/). The AWS Region Services team combines AWS global cloud leadership with Australian security expertise to deliver highly secure, scalable environments for sensitive workloads. We’re creating innovative ways to use cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning while maintaining the highest standards of security and operational excellence. The Engineering organisation within Region Services is structured across core capability pillars: Compute & Machine Learning, Security Identity & Compliance, Storage & Databases, and a growing capability domain. Collectively these pillars encompass a team of varying technical skillsets, including Engineers; Technical Program Managers and Subject Matter Experts, organised into focused sub-teams. This is an opportunity to make a lasting impact on Australia’s digital future. You’ll work with AWS services, implement innovative solutions, and help customers succeed in their most important missions. We’re committed to helping our builders grow through continuous learning, mentoring, and collaboration with industry experts. Are you ready to build the future of secure cloud computing in Australia? Key job responsibilities You'll be the engineer who keeps one of the world's largest cloud providers running while simultaneously making it better. Your dual mandate — operational excellence today and engineering innovation for tomorrow — means no two weeks look the same. You'll own the health and reliability of critical AWS software systems, responding to operational events with the calm precision of someone who understands the architecture end-to-end. But you won't stop at firefighting. You'll identify patterns in operational burden and engineer them away, building automation and tooling that gives your team back hours, days, and weeks. Your responsibilities will span the full lifecycle of complex distributed systems. You'll design and implement solutions that reduce operational toil at scale, turning manual processes into self-healing, automated workflows. You'll dive deep into unfamiliar technologies — because in this environment, breadth of knowledge is as valuable as depth — and emerge with insights that drive meaningful improvements. You'll collaborate across capability pillars, bringing your systems expertise to bear on challenges in compute, security, storage, and beyond. You'll mentor fellow engineers, contribute to architectural decisions that shape the programme's future, and champion operational best practices that raise the bar for the entire team. A day in the life Your morning begins with a quick scan of system health dashboards — the overnight metrics tell a story, and you're fluent in reading it. A minor anomaly catches your eye; you investigate, trace it to a configuration drift, and push a fix before it becomes a customer-impacting event. That's the kind of proactive engineering that defines your approach. By mid-morning, you're deep in code. The automation framework you've been building is nearly ready — once deployed, it will eliminate a manual runbook that currently consumes hours of engineering time each week. You push your latest changes, kick off the test suite, and switch context. After lunch, you join a cross-pillar design review. A colleague from the Security Identity & Compliance team is proposing a new approach to credential rotation at scale. You ask the questions that sharpen the design, offer an alternative pattern you've seen work in distributed systems, and volunteer to prototype a component. Later in the afternoon, you pair with a newer team member who's working through their first operational deep-dive. You guide them through the investigative