Principal Engineer, Amazon Leo, Amazon Leo

Amazon Leo is an initiative to launch a constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites that will provide low-latency, high-speed broadband network connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world — from individual households to schools, hospitals, businesses, and government agencies. The Leo Software Defined Networking (SDN) team designs, implements, and operates the network virtualization stack and SDN control plane signaling. Our scope spans beam planning, routing, and forwarding through our SDN Controller, Agents, and Applications that provide a high-throughput telecom service comprised of Low Earth Orbit satellites, customer terminals, gateways, cloud services, and terrestrial network infrastructure that connects into public and private networks.

About the role

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to serve as the technical leader for Network Observability solutions for an advanced global telecom service via both space and terrestrial networks. This role offers high autonomy to shape both the technology and the engineering culture of a team building a new category of infrastructure at planetary scale.

Responsibilities

• Technical Vision & Architecture: Define and drive the long-term technical vision and architectural strategy for network observability systems across Amazon's Leo network infrastructure. Design scalable, fault-tolerant observability platforms capable of ingesting, processing, and surfacing insights from massive volumes of network telemetry data in real time. Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies, frameworks, and methodologies to ensure the observability stack remains at the forefront of industry best practices. Own architectural decisions that balance short-term delivery needs with long-term maintainability, scalability, and operational excellence.
• Cross-Functional System Design: Architect end-to-end solutions that span multiple teams, services, and organizational boundaries, ensuring coherent integration across the network observability ecosystem. Drive alignment on shared data models, APIs, instrumentation standards, and telemetry pipelines across dependent systems. Influence and contribute to org-wide platform capabilities that raise the bar for all teams building on or consuming observability data.
• Technical Leadership & Force Multiplication: Serve as the technical lead on the most demanding, cross-functional problems. Exert influence across multiple teams, increasing their productivity and effectiveness by sharing deep knowledge and experience. Functionally decompose complex problems into simple, straightforward solutions.
• Engineering Excellence: Define best practices for the software development lifecycle — design, implementation, testing, and operations. Drive quality metrics, code review standards, and operational excellence mechanisms across the organization.

Requirements

• 10+ years of relevant engineering experience
• Experience in partnering with product and program management teams
• Experience developing and executing a software roadmap
• Deep hands-on technical expertise in software design and development
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Proficiency in Java, C++, RUST, or similar systems programming languages

Qualifications

• Master’s in Computer Science or related field
• Deep understanding of data structures, algorithms, and optimization techniques for storage and index processing
• Ability to influence technical decisions across organizational boundaries
• Success mentoring senior engineers and elevating team technical capabilities

Pay

USA, WA, Redmond - $220,100.00 - $297,700.00 USD annually

Benefits

• Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs)
• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription)
• Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and Mental Health Support
• Medical Advice Line
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage
• 401(k) matching
• Paid time off
• Parental leave

Learn more about our benefits at amazon.jobs/en/benefits.