Senior Software Engineer, Managed Streaming Kafka (MSK)

About the role

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.

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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 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

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

Skills

Recent MSK innovations:

• MSK Replicator for External Clusters (April 2026)
• Topic Management APIs (February 2026)
• Apache Kafka 4.1 Support (October 2025)
• 5x More Partitions on Express Brokers (July 2025)
• Seamless Certificate Renewals (May 2025)
• Express Brokers (re:Invent 2024)
• KRaft Mode (May 2024)
• Tiered Storage (2023)

Benefits

Learn more about Amazon MSK:

• AWS re:Invent 2024: Express Brokers for Amazon MSK
• AWS re:Invent 2023: How Rivian builds real-time analytics from electric vehicles
• AWS re:Invent 2021: How Coinbase uses Amazon MSK as an event store for applications
• AWS re:Invent 2020: How Goldman Sachs uses an Amazon MSK backbone for Transaction Banking Platform
• AWS re:Invent 2020: How New Relic is migrating its Apache Kafka cluster to Amazon MSK
• AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) Launch
• MSK Tiered Storage: Optimize cost and improve Kafka scalability

Pay

The 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.

Schedule

Amazon offers flexible work hours and arrangements to support work-life balance.