Principal Software Engineer

Who you are

• Experience designing, building, operating, and managing large-scale distributed systems or web services
• Experience leading the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems
• Experience with AWS technologies
• Experience leading engineering teams as a mentor or tech lead
• Experience developing and executing/delivering product and technical roadmaps
• 10+ years of engineering experience
• Experience managing large server fleets
• Experience working cross functionally to implement and optimize workflows
• Experience with architecting highly available systems that utilize load balancing, horizontal scalability and high availability
• Experience with full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
• Experience with database internals, managed database services, or infrastructure automation

What the job involves

• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale relational databases in the cloud
• Behind the scenes, a critical engineering challenge powers this service: delivering continuous software updates across one of the largest managed database fleets in the world, with minimal customer disruption
• As a Principal Engineer on our Database Fleet Management team, you will own the technical vision and architecture for how we deliver software updates at massive scale
• You will drive innovation in patching orchestration, intelligent scheduling, deployment pipelines, and fleet lifecycle management
• Your goal: increase delivery velocity while reducing customer impact to near zero
• You will provide cross-cutting technical leadership across multiple engineering teams, influencing architecture decisions that span the full software delivery lifecycle from scheduling through execution to customer communication
• Architect fleet update systems that deliver minimal-downtime software updates to millions of database instances across multiple engines, regions, and availability zones
• Drive cross-cutting technical strategy across scheduling, orchestration, deployment, and customer experience, ensuring architectural coherence across multiple teams
• Design and deliver highly scalable distributed systems with demanding availability, latency, and throughput requirements
• Innovate on approaches to reduce update latency and customer impact through intelligent scheduling, automated safety mechanisms, and progressive rollout strategies
• Raise the engineering bar across the organization through mentorship, operational excellence, design patterns, and architecture reviews
• Partner with product and business stakeholders to translate customer pain points into technical strategy, balancing long-term platform investments with near-term delivery
• Influence the broader AWS organization on fleet management, lifecycle automation, and software delivery best practices
• You will work on systems that schedule, orchestrate, and execute millions of fleet maintenance operations, balancing service health requirements with customer preferences
• The challenges include building intelligent scheduling at scale, orchestrating complex multi-step workflows across diverse database engines, deploying updates with minimal disruption, and communicating proactively with customers throughout the process