Software Development Engineer II, AWS WorkSpaces

About the role

As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, we build intuitive, differentiated business applications—powered by Amazon’s real-world experience—that millions of companies use to manage day-to-day operations. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon’s expertise to create opinionated, turnkey solutions that customers choose to buy over build, becoming their trusted partner for secure, fast, and scalable technology.

You’ll join the team behind Amazon WorkSpaces, the cloud desktop platform that lets millions of users provision secure Windows, Amazon Linux, or Ubuntu desktops and access them from any device or browser—without hardware procurement or complex installs. Users scale instantly as their organization changes. This role tackles problems where latency, security, reliability, and scale collide, delivering a best-in-class interactive streaming platform for enterprise and ISV customers.

Responsibilities

• Design and build features for our cloud desktop and interactive streaming platform, owning them end-to-end from scoping to production.
• Write clean, maintainable code that runs at scale, optimizing real-time streaming paths for latency and reliability.
• Operate what you ship, including on-call responsibilities, and work across multiple AWS services to deliver secure, highly available infrastructure.
• Dive deep into performance—profiling, benchmarking, and identifying bottlenecks—while collaborating on system design and architecture decisions.
• Participate in code reviews, raise engineering standards, and contribute to operational excellence.
• Take initiative to fix issues and improve systems, helping the team scale technically (millions of concurrent desktops) and organizationally (mentoring, process improvements, documentation).
• Evaluate new approaches and help decide where to invest next to keep our streaming platform best-in-class in a fast-evolving market.

A day in the life

You’ll balance executing on our long-term roadmap with responding to customer issues and innovating to meet new needs. Working closely with engineers, product managers, and AWS partner teams (e.g., networking, security), you’ll solve real problems for enterprise IT organizations and ISV partners who demand reliability, security, and speed. Beyond engineering, you’ll have opportunities to mentor, shape team direction, and stretch into new areas.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience.
• 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture experience (design patterns, reliability, scaling) for new and existing systems.
• Experience programming with at least one software programming language.

Preferred Qualifications

• 3+ years of full software development life cycle experience, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D, with options for supplemental life plans).
• Mental health support (EAP, Medical Advice Line).
• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) for healthcare and dependent care.
• Adoption and surrogacy reimbursement coverage.
• 401(k) matching.
• Paid time off and parental leave.
• Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs).

Pay

Base salary range: $143,700 – $194,400 USD annually (Seattle, WA). Final compensation will depend on experience, qualifications, and location.

About the team

AWS Applied AI Solutions values diverse experiences and encourages candidates from non-traditional backgrounds to apply. We foster a culture of inclusion, learning, and curiosity, with employee-led affinity groups and ongoing events (e.g., Conversations on Race and Ethnicity, AmazeCon). Mentorship and career growth are priorities, with resources to help you develop as a professional. Work-life balance is core to our culture, with flexible hours and arrangements to support harmony between work and home.