Software Development Engineer (Elastic Kubernetes Service), EKS Scalability & Performance

About the role

We are looking for a Software Development Engineer to join the EKS KCP Scalability team and work on some of the hardest distributed systems problems at Amazon. You will design, build, and operate systems that directly determine whether EKS customers — from startups to the largest AI/ML workloads on the planet — experience a reliable, performant control plane.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the Vertical Auto-Scaling Service (VAS) and its next-generation successor (VAS 2.0), which dynamically right-sizes EKS control planes by evaluating CPU/memory utilization, etcd throttle rates, node-count thresholds, and network utilization simultaneously.
• Work on the SLA measurement pipeline (MinutelySLA → DailySLA → MonthlySLA) that enforces EKS's uptime commitments, investigating breaching clusters weekly and building automation to detect and mitigate degradation before customers notice.
• Contribute to the control plane architecture for EKS Ultraclusters, defining how the API server, etcd, and associated components scale to support 100,000-node clusters running generative AI workloads.
• Maintain and extend version release qualification scale tests that gate every new Kubernetes version before it reaches customers.
• Engage with the upstream Kubernetes community — driving KEPs that work backwards from EKS customer requirements around performance, scale, and resiliency.
• Depending on your interests and the team's priorities, you may also work on workload identity systems (IRSA, EKS Pod Identity), Cluster Access Management, EC2 capacity management and grey failure detection, or Large-Scale Event response and weight shifting.

About the team

The EKS KCP Scalability organization owns the performance, availability, and autoscaling of the Kubernetes control plane powering Amazon EKS — from small development clusters to 100,000-node Ultraclusters running generative AI workloads. We ensure every EKS cluster operates within its contracted SLA and delivers predictable, high-performance behavior at any scale.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
• 1+ years of software development engineer or related occupational experience
• 1+ years of designing and developing large-scale, multi-tiered, multi-threaded, embedded or distributed software applications, tools, systems, and services using: C#, C++, Java, or Perl experience
• 1+ years of Object Oriented Design experience
• Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
• Experience programming with at least one software programming language