Software Dev Engineer III, Redshift
About the role
Amazon Redshift is a rapidly growing, fast, and fully managed petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Tens of thousands of customers rely on Redshift to analyze exabytes of data every day to power their most critical analytics workloads. Join the Amazon Redshift Data Foundation team to solve some of the most challenging problems in petabyte-scale distributed data systems. Our team owns the critical foundation that underpins Redshift's storage, metadata, durability, and reliability guarantees — the cornerstone on which every query, every table, and every customer workload depends. You will dive deep into complex interactions within the Redshift engine, tackling large-scale, high-complexity problems that span data storage architecture, durability mechanisms, and performance optimization at massive scale. We're looking for an engineer with a strong understanding of distributed systems, storage internals, and the curiosity to ask the right questions as we build a best-in-class cloud analytics database engine. You will design and deliver features that keep Redshift at the forefront of cloud analytics — ensuring data is always safe, always accessible, and always fast.
Responsibilities
- Innovate system architectures that address scalability, reliability, and performance for large-scale distributed systems
- Design and develop core storage, metadata, and catalog subsystems that operate reliably at petabyte scale
- Solve large-scale, high-complexity problems spanning data durability, availability, consistency, and performance
- Debug deep, cross-cutting issues that require understanding the full stack — from query planning to distributed storage to on-disk data formats
- Drive performance improvements in storage I/O paths, metadata access patterns, in-memory caching, and catalog operations
- Improve reliability and durability guarantees through resilient system design, automated recovery, and defensive engineering
- Mentor and grow junior engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical guidance
- Raise the bar on operational excellence by building deep observability, reducing operational toil, and strengthening the team's ability to resolve complex customer-impacting issues
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
- Databases and Distributed Systems experience is mandatory
- Storage and C++ experience is a plus
- 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience (preferred)
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent (preferred)
Pay
USA, CA, East Palo Alto - 193,300.00 - 261,500.00 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