Jobs · Engineering · Illinois

Principal Solutions Developer , Prototyping and Customer Engineering (PACE)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Chicago, IL · 3 wk ago
EngineeringFull-time

About the role

The Prototyping and Customer Engineering (PACE) team helps customers create early iterations of products and solutions, often exploring new technical grounds. We're seeking experienced technologists who possess a unique balance of technical depth, business acumen, and strong interpersonal skills.

Role Overview

As a Principal Solutions Developer, you will partner with customers and AWS account and service teams to craft highly scalable, flexible, and resilient solutions that address customer business problems and accelerate AWS adoption. You'll shape and build prototypes across domains including Machine Learning, Agentic Design, Serverless Architecture, and multi-modal Generative AI—with most projects exploring the art of the possible using the latest methods, frameworks, services, and models. You'll work across industry verticals including automotive, energy, healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, and media and entertainment.

Key job responsibilities

  • You're expected to be both "coach" and "player", essentially a CTO-like profile. You must be hands-on with deep experience and knowledge, articulate in communication, and capable of mentoring team members. You'll represent AWS in customer meetings, serving as both the AWS voice and customer advocate.

  • You will operate with complete independence in ambiguous environments where business objectives are emergent and problems are novel. You will decompose significantly complex challenges into elegant solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes, with your work influencing entire organizations and establishing patterns that become reference architectures and reusable solutions.

  • As a technical leader, you combine design and architecture knowledge with development capability, comfortable at both the whiteboard and keyboard. You'll push the technical bar by taking initiative to learn new topics and experiment across domains such as AI, serverless, Agentic Design, and Physical AI in enterprise contexts.

  • You'll own key development tasks from design through implementation with minimal supervision, delivering to a high standard. You'll establish trust by defining clear paths forward and actively reviewing others' proposals, speaking up when architectural choices need improvement.

  • This role demands exceptional judgment, the ability to think big while diving deep, and a relentless focus on raising the bar for technical excellence.

  • You'll improve your scale and impact across the team and organization with a technical focus. You will look across the team's technical body of work to identify ways to invent and simplify, defining experiments and projects that you and others in the team can execute on. This includes working to optimize developer-related processes and identify improvement opportunities that benefit the broader organization.

  • Thought leadership in AI-assisted coding methods and tools is essential. You lead by example and continuously seek better ways to apply emerging technology to code development.

Leadership Profile

You're expected to be both "coach" and "player", essentially a CTO-like profile. You must be hands-on with deep experience and knowledge, articulate in communication, and capable of mentoring team members. You'll represent AWS in customer meetings, serving as both the AWS voice and customer advocate. At the Principal level, you will operate with complete independence in ambiguous environments where business objectives are emergent and problems are novel. You will decompose significantly complex challenges into elegant solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes, with your work influencing entire organizations and establishing patterns that become reference architectures and reusable solutions.

Technical Excellence

As a technical leader, you combine design and architecture knowledge with development capability, comfortable at both the whiteboard and keyboard. You'll push the technical bar by taking initiative to learn new topics and experiment across domains such as AI, serverless, Agentic Design, and Physical AI in enterprise contexts.

Ownership and Execution

You'll own key development tasks from design through implementation with minimal supervision, delivering to a high standard. You'll establish trust by defining clear paths forward and actively reviewing others' proposals, speaking up when architectural choices need improvement.

Scale and Impact

You'll improve your scale and impact across the team and organization with a technical focus. You will look across the team's technical body of work to identify ways to invent and simplify, defining experiments and projects that you and others in the team can execute on. This includes working to optimize developer-related processes and identify improvement opportunities that benefit the broader organization.

Thought leadership in AI-assisted coding methods and tools

Essential. You lead by example and continuously seek better ways to apply emerging technology to code development.

A day in the life

  • You'll review technical designs for upcoming prototypes to identify improvement opportunities and emerging trends where the team can invest and simplify solutions.

  • Working collaboratively with team members, specialists, and service teams, you'll propose better approaches to solve customer technical challenges and advocate for these solutions through discussions and written narratives.

  • During customer prototype engagements, you'll collaborate with developers, program managers, and specialists to deliver results—serving as project lead on some engagements and contributing part-time on others.

About The Team

Our team comprises mostly experienced full-stack developers that are highly proficient building AI solutions and are passionate about building with AWS services in a rapid development environment. We move quickly and support each other through knowledge sharing, building our own tools as readily as we leverage existing ones to achieve the art of the possible, transforming concepts into working prototypes in days and weeks that accelerate our customers toward production.

Basic Qualifications

  • 15+ years of specific technology domain areas (e.g. software development, cloud computing, systems engineering, infrastructure, security, networking, data & analytics) experience

  • Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics or equivalent

  • Experience developing technology solutions and evangelising end-to-end technology roadmaps that guide IT transformations toward cloud computing

  • Experience in cloud architecture and CXO level engagement

  • Knowledge of distributed systems design and implementation or equivalent

  • Knowledge of large scale automation and workflow management or equivalent

  • Knowledge of presentations and whiteboarding skills with a high degree of comfort speaking with internal and external executives, IT management, and developers

  • Experience architecting, migrating, transforming or modernizing customer requirements to the cloud

  • Experienced with designing, building, launching and operating solutions from concept to production.

  • Masters degree in computer science with proven experience building agentic designs for production scale is highly preferred.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experienced with designing, building, launching and operating solutions from concept to production.

  • Masters degree in computer science with proven experience building agentic designs for production scale is highly preferred.

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