Software Development Engineer, RDS Platform

We are looking for a highly-skilled, experienced, and motivated software engineer to help us in our endeavour to make AWS the best place to operate relational databases. The RDS Platform team builds and operates the foundational infrastructure that powers every RDS and Aurora control plane operation — from the metadata layer that tracks millions of customer databases, to the backup and disaster recovery systems that ensure data durability for customers. This is a rare opportunity to work across cross-cutting technologies spanning database internals, distributed storage systems, and high-availability architecture — building systems that customers depend on to reliably create, operate, protect, and recover their databases at any scale.


Key job responsibilities
You will build and operate systems that protect customer data and ensure RDS control plane reliability. This includes database access governance, event-driven architectures, disaster recovery automation, and backup orchestration — systems that operate across millions of instances and must be resilient to failures at every layer.

This requires solving hard distributed systems challenges at massive scale, where a single system serves the entire RDS fleet, performance cliffs are non-linear, and the blast radius of any issue is measured in customer impact across regions. As a foundational AWS platform, our solutions must be solid, scalable, efficient, and highly fault tolerant. You will own all aspects of engineering including development, testing, deployment, and operational excellence of your services.

You will work across team boundaries on shared infrastructure challenges — evolving legacy architectures, building platform capabilities that extend to multiple AWS organizations, and right-sizing systems for the next decade of growth. You resolve ambiguity, innovate on behalf of customers, and believe that debate makes strong ideas stronger.

About the team
AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.

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.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience programming with at least one software programming language

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- 3+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers.