Senior Software Development Manager, Hydro

Hydro is an emerging framework for building correct, performant distributed systems born at Berkeley and evolving in open source with a center of gravity at AWS. We are looking for a Senior Software Development Manager to lead the AWS Hydro team, own the technical strategy, scale the engineering organization, and grow the open source community.

This is a high-visibility role to help define the future of reliable and agile software engineering, guided by AI and protected by cutting-edge correctness techniques. This is an opportunity to work with AWS leaders in collaboration with technologists from Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. You"ll collaborate on products targeted at a broad audience: internal AWS developers building some of our most critical infrastructure, and open-source innovators building the next generation of reliable, scalable services. The role offers high visibility internally with AWS leadership, and externally in open source.

• Lead the vision and execution for the Hydro team centered at AWS
• Build and scale a world-class engineering team delivering the core framework, compiler, simulation-testing framework, and deployment harnesses
• Drive open source community growth, partner engagement, and ecosystem expansion
• Represent Hydro to customers, partners, and developers

Key job responsibilities

• Own the roadmap, delivery, and operations for the Hydro framework spanning the language APIs, tool ecosystem, observability and deployment patterns.
• Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing engineering organization, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and speed.
• Drive open source community strategy including contributor experience, governance, ecosystem expansion.
• Set and raise the technical bar - establish AI-assisted development workflows, drive architectural decisions, and ensure the framework remains model-driven and developer-friendly.
• Drive executive alignment through VP-level reviews, PR/FAQs, and strategic narratives positioning Hydro within AWS"s broader SDLC strategy.
• Champion production readiness - own deployment toolkits, reference architectures, and observability patterns for both green-field and brown-field adoption, taking distributed systems written in Hydro from prototype to production.
• Represent Hydro externally at conferences, in blog posts, and through direct customer engagement.

A day in the life

You"ll split your time between strategic leadership and hands-on technical engagement. Mornings might include reviewing community PRs and contributor roadmaps, followed by architecture deep-dives with your engineering leads on multi-agent orchestration. Afternoons could involve partnering with AWS Kiro or Automated Reasoning teams on integration work, presenting roadmap updates to VP-level stakeholders, or engaging directly with customers adopting Hydro for production workloads. You operate as the single-threaded owner for Hydro across open source, product, and engineering.

About the team

We"re a high-ownership, high-velocity team of technologists and developers operating in a space that many of us pioneered at Berkeley. The bulk of the original Hydro team is now in this group at AWS, including the science and development leads; new PhD students at Berkeley continue to push the envelope in collaboration with us, alongside the broader open-source community.

The team is now growing beyond its initial startup-style mode: the software is gaining adoption in high-stakes use cases, and we're bringing on more engineering talent both junior and senior. Coming out of the university and startups with a will to have impact, we foster an environment that celebrates knowledge-sharing, mentorship and working backward from customer needs. Senior members engage in one-on-one mentoring as well as customer engagement, and we care deeply about career growth - assigning projects that build both product and technical expertise so you feel empowered to take on more complex challenges over time.