Senior Software Engineer, Managed Streaming Kafka (MSK)
About the role
Come build the future of data streaming with the Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) team. We're looking for builders who want to work on one of the fastest-growing services in AWS. Amazon MSK is a fully managed Apache Kafka service, and if you care about data streaming, open source, and operating at scale, this is the team. You'll work across the full stack: the control plane APIs, the Kafka platform itself, and the tooling that makes Kafka easier to run for everyone. Upstream compatibility is a core tenet. Your changes to Kafka ship back to open source. That's the deal, and it's a good one.
You get to build inside AWS and contribute to one of the most widely adopted open-source platforms in the world. Day to day, you'll design features, improve performance, prototype solutions, and ship code that serves customers directly. You'll collaborate with engineers across the team and work with senior leaders to shape the roadmap, including identifying what needs to change in the upstream platform to unlock what customers need next.
Recent MSK Innovations
- MSK Replicator for External Clusters (April 2026): Replication from external Apache Kafka clusters to MSK Express Brokers and back, enabling migration and multi-cloud distribution.
- Topic Management APIs (February 2026): New CreateTopic, UpdateTopic, and DeleteTopic APIs with console integration, eliminating the need to maintain Kafka admin clients.
- Apache Kafka 4.1 Support (October 2025): Queues as a preview feature, a new Streams Rebalance Protocol in early access, and Eligible Leader Replicas (ELR).
- 5x More Partitions on Express Brokers (July 2025): Partition-bound workloads can now be hosted on fewer brokers, simplifying cluster sizing.
- Seamless Certificate Renewals (May 2025): Brokers receive updated encryption certificates without restarts.
- Express Brokers (re:Invent 2024): Up to 3x more throughput per broker, 20x faster scaling, 90% faster recovery, and hands-free unlimited storage.
- KRaft Mode (May 2024): Clusters run without ZooKeeper, supporting up to 60 brokers.
- Tiered Storage (2023): Decouples compute from storage to optimize cost and scalability.
Responsibilities
- Design features, improve performance, prototype solutions, and ship code that serves customers directly.
- Collaborate with engineers across the team and work with senior leaders to shape the roadmap, including identifying what needs to change in the upstream platform to unlock what customers need next.
Basic Qualifications
- 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
Preferred Qualifications
- 5+ 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
Skills
- Experience with Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, or Spark is a plus. What matters more is that you're curious, you ship, and you think in systems.
Pay
- USA, WA, Seattle: 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually
- 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.
Benefits
- Health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage)
- 401(k) matching
- Paid time off
- Parental leave