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 race condition between two services, shipped a fix, and unblocked a team of engineers whose pipeline is green again.

By noon, you"re designing automation that lets any engineer spin up a fully functional multi-region DynamoDB test environment with a single command - replacing what used to take a week of manual configuration. You"re thinking about cross-region networking, security boundaries, and making complex infrastructure invisible to its users.

After lunch, you"re debugging a circular dependency that"s been silently generating tickets for months. You find it, fix it, and close an entire class of failures.

What makes this role different: You"re building the infrastructure that lets every DynamoDB team validate their features before they ship to customers. When you make test environments faster and more reliable, you multiply the velocity of hundreds of engineers.

The problems are deeply technical - distributed systems orchestration, fleet management, cross-account security, credential rotation at scale - but you"ll ship code every week and see immediate impact.

The team is small (6 engineers), the scope is large, and the ownership is real. You"ll design, build, and operate entire systems end-to-end. You"ll work with Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, CloudFormation, EC2 fleet management, IAM, Python, and Java. You"ll use AI coding tools daily.

Every major DynamoDB launch validates on infrastructure your team builds. You make that possible.

About the team

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.

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 conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness.

Mentorship & 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.

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 in the cloud.