Software Development Manager, Aurora Compute & Services

You should come work with the Aurora team to help build a service that:

Reliably manages a large fleet of databases for our customers freeing them from traditional database operations
Guarantees best-in-class availability and failover capabilities to sustain the world’s most demanding workloads
Orchestrates and automates the complete lifecycle of a database cluster from creation to operation to scale-out and fail-over
Has the unique opportunity to integrate closely with our engine and storage layers to build an end-to-end solution that is easy-to-use and at the same time full-fills the demanding requirements of an enterprise-grade solution

Amazon Aurora control plane does all this and more. Amazon Aurora is a cloud-native relational database which combines the scalability and performance of the best NoSQL databases paired with full compatibility to the most popular relational open source databases - MySQL and PostgreSQL. Amazon Aurora can store petabytes of customer data and can handle peaks of millions of queries per second. As one of the fastest-growing services at the core of the AWS Cloud and also one of the largest managed database services in our business, your engineering decisions have widespread impact across AWS, Amazon, and beyond. Many of the world's fastest growing businesses depend on the scale and performance of Amazon Aurora and its control plane to support their mission-critical workloads. We continue to believe it is Day 1 for the Amazon Aurora business. We are constantly improving and adding new capabilities to Amazon Aurora.

As a Software Development Manager in this role, you will own the the Aurora Availability charter from the Control Plane perspective. You will work in a highly collaborative, diverse and engaging environment that attracts talent and provides ample opportunities to grow and learn. You will have the freedom to shape how the team works and what mechanisms and processes you want to establish to achieve the teams and organizations goals and deliver results to our customers. Our 3-AZ availability promise to our customers is one of the most important aspect of our service. We also report our SLA monthly internally all the way up to the Amazon Board. Customers expect a high bar for all deliverables in this area. So this role gives you the opportunity to have a significant impact on the future of Aurora and its future growth.

In this role you provide technical direction and guidance to the team you are working with. Our engineers know that building a control plane to manage large scale cloud native databases is fun and challenging. It is not just any distributed system. It is a system orchestrating a distributed storage engine operating with petabyte scale data sets, real-time node failure detection mechanisms, multi-datacenter and cross-continent replication. You will coach junior and intermediate members of the team to become established contributors to our service by providing interesting and aspirational projects and mentoring them to successfully complete them. You will collaborate with senior engineers to work on large and complex features that have impact across different teams in the organization and high value for our customers.

You will also work directly with our database engine and storage teams as well as customers to gather feedback and understand their use-cases and failure scenarios. Together with the Aurora leadership this will help you to shape a vision for the team and define and align roadmap and deliveries with our product management. You will lead the delivery of new Aurora availability improvements both customer-facing as well as improving operational and technical efficiency of our product. This will require broad understanding of distributed systems and deep knowledge of monitoring, observability and database recovery in error situations. You will be a thoughtful steward of existing systems, appropriately challenging assumptions and driving change when necessary to allow us to scale for growth.

This is a hands-on position in which you will be asked to show ownership. If you are technically knowledgeable and a good collaborator and communicator that can lead with empathy for our customers and engineers, then this is for you. We don’t need you to be an expert in databases. You will have a chance to learn on the go. We rather appreciate curiosity and craftsmanship over knowledge in specific technologies. At the same time you will benefit from interacting with many of the talented people within AWS and they will help you improve and expand your management and technical skills on a daily basis.

AWS Utility Computing (UC) provides product innovations — from foundational services such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), to consistently released new product innovations that continue to set AWS’s services and features apart in the industry. As a member of the UC organization, you’ll support the development and management of Compute, Database, Storage, Internet of Things (Iot), Platform, and Productivity Apps services in AWS, including support for customers who require specialized security solutions for their cloud services.


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.

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.

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.

AWS values curiosity and connection. Our employee-led and company-sponsored affinity groups promote inclusion and empower our people to take pride in what makes us unique. Our inclusion events foster stronger, more collaborative teams. Our continual innovation is fueled by the bold ideas, fresh perspectives, and passionate voices our teams bring to everything we do.

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.

Key job responsibilities
- Grow and foster talent from Junior to Senior devs on a daily basis
- Establish mechanisms to efficiently run the team and help prioritize and balance the backlog
- Work with PM and other engineering teams on roadmap strategy and prioritization
- Share updates to the leadership team on the teams deliverables
- Review designs and help shape the teams design documents
- Manage and drive the operational ownership of the team

About the team
The Aurora Availability Control Plane team is a team of seasoned Sr. Developers and growing talent engineers, who own the complete lifecycle and service components of the cross-region, high availability marquee feature of Aurora. They set the bar high for what we deliver to our most demanding customers.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

- 3+ years of engineering team management experience
- 7+ years of engineering experience
- 8+ years of leading the definition and development of multi tier web services experience
- Knowledge of engineering practices and patterns for the full software/hardware/networks development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, certification, and livesite operations
- Experience partnering with product or program management teams

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and senior leadership to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical designs, and product strategy
- Experience in recruiting, hiring, mentoring/coaching and managing teams of Software Engineers to improve their skills, and make them more effective, product software engineers

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.