Principal, Senior Principal and Distinguished Engineer, AWS Database Services

What You'll Work On

You'll work on three key forces reshaping the database landscape:

• AI-assisted development changing how engineers build on top of databases
• Agentic AI creating new requirements for low-latency, high-consistency data access
• The collapse of the boundary between operational and analytical data

Key job responsibilities

• Define architecture for services that cannot go down, cannot lose data, and must scale to meet demand
• Drive technical strategy across your service area, shaping roadmap, investment decisions, and the direction of engineering teams
• Solve the unsolved — the distributed systems problems, the consistency models, the performance cliffs, and the failure modes that don't have a textbook answer yet
• Build, prototype, and ship — from early-stage experiments and proof-of-concepts to production systems trusted by the world's largest enterprises
• Raise the bar for the engineers around you through design reviews, mentorship, and the kind of technical judgment that only comes from having done this before
• Engage directly with customers running their most critical workloads on your systems — and translate what you learn into better architecture
• Invent — evaluate emerging technologies, prototype new approaches, and push the boundaries of what managed database services can do, including how AI reshapes the way databases are built, queried, and operated

Basic Qualifications

• A track record of technical decisions that held up — at scale, under pressure, over time
• The instinct to build first: you prototype to learn, ship to validate, and iterate without waiting for perfect conditions
• The ability to influence without authority and earn trust through technical credibility
• Experience working across organizational boundaries to drive outcomes that no single team could achieve alone
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and a bias toward action
• Curiosity about how AI is changing the way engineers build on and with databases — and the drive to be ahead of that curve, not behind it

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep expertise in one or more of: distributed systems, database internals, storage engines, query optimization, replication protocols, consensus algorithms, or high-performance systems

Pay

Base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location.

• USA, CA, East Palo Alto - 230,100.00 - 311,200.00 USD annually
• USA, WA, BELLEVUE - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually
• USA, WA, Bellevue - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually
• USA, WA, REDMOND - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually
• USA, WA, Redmond - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually
• USA, WA, SEATTLE - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually
• USA, WA, Seattle - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually