Principal, Senior Principal and Distinguished Engineer, AWS Database Services

Responsibilities

• Our portfolio spans:
• Amazon Aurora & RDS - The world's most widely deployed managed relational databases, serving enterprise workloads that cannot fail
• Amazon DynamoDB - A single-digit millisecond NoSQL engine operating at a scale most engineers will never encounter anywhere else
• Amazon DocumentDB - MongoDB-compatible document storage built for the cloud
• Amazon Neptune - Graph database powering knowledge graphs, fraud detection, and recommendation engines at scale
• Amazon ElastiCache & MemoryDB - In-memory data stores where microseconds matter
• Amazon Timestream - Purpose-built time-series for IoT, DevOps, and industrial telemetry
• Amazon Keyspaces - Serverless Cassandra-compatible storage at AWS scale
• We are building the database infrastructure for the next generation of AI-native applications. If that's the problem you want to work on, we want to talk.
• Key job responsibilities
• As a Principal Engineer, you are a technical owner - not a consultant, not a reviewer. You will:
• Define architecture for services that cannot go down, cannot lose data, and must scale to meet demand that grows faster than most companies ever see
• Drive technical strategy across your service area, shaping roadmap, investment decisions, and the direction of engineering teams
• Solve the unsolved - the distributed systems problems, the consistency models, the performance cliffs, the failure modes that don't have a textbook answer yet
• Build, prototype, and ship - from early-stage experiments and proof-of-concepts to production systems trusted by the world's largest enterprises
• Raise the bar for the engineers around you through design reviews, mentorship, and the kind of technical judgment that only comes from having done this before
• Engage directly with customers running their most critical workloads on your systems - and translate what you learn into better architecture
• Invent - evaluate emerging technologies, prototype new approaches, and push the boundaries of what managed database services can do, including how AI reshapes the way databases are built, queried, and operated

Requirements

• We're not looking for one type of engineer. We're looking for depth, judgment, and the drive to own hard problems. Across our openings, we value:
• A track record of technical decisions that held up - at scale, under pressure, over time
• The instinct to build first: you prototype to learn, ship to validate, and iterate without waiting for perfect conditions
• The ability to influence without authority and earn trust through technical credibility
• Experience working across organizational boundaries to drive outcomes that no single team could achieve alone
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and a bias toward action
• Curiosity about how AI is changing the way engineers build on and with databases - and the drive to be ahead of that curve, not behind it
• Deep expertise in one or more of: distributed systems, database internals, storage engines, query optimization, replication protocols, consensus algorithms, or high-performance systems
• Amazon is a
• What We're Looking For

Additional Information

You've spent your career solving hard problems. Here's one worth your next decade. The database is the heartbeat of every application ever built, and at AWS, we don't just run databases, we reinvent them. Our database products collectively serve hundreds of millions of workloads, process trillions of transactions, and store some of the most critical data on earth - making us the database infrastructure of the internet. AWS Database Services is a $17B+ business and one of the fastest-growing parts of AWS, where the problems are not incremental, the scale is not theoretical, and the stakes are genuinely high. You'll work alongside some of the most accomplished database engineers in the world, with access to infrastructure, data, and customer relationships that don't exist anywhere else - and the autonomy to define what "excellent" looks like, not just execute against someone else's definition of it. We're hiring multiple Principal Engineers across this portfolio, and we're looking for builders who want to shape products used by millions of real customers.

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