Software Development Engineer, Leo Data Science Platform

Amazon Leo is Amazon's low Earth orbit satellite network. Our mission is to deliver fast, reliable internet connectivity to customers beyond the reach of existing networks. From individual households to schools, hospitals, businesses, and government agencies, Amazon Leo will serve people and organizations operating in locations without reliable connectivity.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the entity lifecycle APIs — create, provision, power‑on, and tear down virtual satellites, gateways, customer terminals, and antennas — and drive them to and past a 99.9% availability bar.
• Design and evolve the orchestration layer: long‑running state machines that coordinate provisioning across distributed dependencies where any step can fail on physics rather than code, and where partial failure must be recoverable rather than restart‑from‑scratch.
• Own the service‑side plugin framework — the published contract, registration, delegation, and result aggregation that lets subsystem owner teams define their own initialization, health validation, and provisioning logic without our team in the loop.
• Build the health‑check aggregation API: a single call that returns per‑subsystem health with every failure attributed to the team that owns it, so customers self‑diagnose instead of paging an on‑call engineer.
• Build and own continuous canaries that validate the full stack against a pre‑production constellation on a fixed schedule, wired so that a failure cuts a ticket and pages automatically with no human in the detection path.
• Integrate with certificate, identity, and entity‑registry services — device identity generation at constellation scale, certificate lifecycle, namespace registration, and the calibration data that makes a virtual entity behave like its physical twin.
• Drive down provisioning latency (currently measured in minutes at p90) through parallelization, image pre‑baking, and eliminating serialized dependencies.
• Own observability end‑to‑end — structured logging, embedded metrics, distributed tracing, and log centralization — with the specific goal that a customer can root‑cause a failed run from logs alone without recreating it.
• Scale the platform for concurrent multi‑tenant use: capacity management across bare‑metal pools, fleet‑wide provisioning throughput, and cost per simulated entity.
• Partner closely with the virtualization and emulation team that owns the host layer, with subsystem owner teams who build against your plugin contract, and with the test frameworks and release pipelines that are your highest‑volume customers.

Team Overview

You will join the VirtSat Platform team within Leo Developer Experience. The team owns VirtSat end‑to‑end — the simulation service control plane, the virtualization host layer, fidelity of the emulated subsystems, and adoption across Leo. This role sits on the services side of that boundary, owning the simulation service’s public APIs, provisioning workflows, plugin framework, canaries, health checks, and its availability and latency posture.

Export Control Requirement

Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

Basic Qualifications

• 3+ years of non‑internship professional software development experience.
• Experience designing, building, operating, and managing large‑scale distributed systems or web services.
• Knowledge of at least one programming language such as Java, C#, JavaScript, Python, Ruby or Perl.
• Experience designing and evolving APIs, including backward compatibility and versioning.
• Working knowledge of AWS compute, orchestration, and observability services.
• BS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with workflow orchestration for long‑running, failure‑prone processes — AWS Step Functions, Temporal, Airflow, or similar — including checkpointing and resume semantics.
• Experience operating a service to a defined availability target: canaries, alarming, on‑call, error budgets, and driving availability upward through measurement rather than heroics.
• Experience with plugin, extension, or federated‑ownership architectures where teams outside your own contribute code behind a contract you publish and version.
• Experience with EC2 bare‑metal, virtualization, or hardware‑in‑the‑loop test infrastructure.
• Familiarity with PKI, certificate provisioning, or secure device identity at fleet scale.
• Experience with observability at scale — structured logging, metric cardinality management, distributed tracing.
• Familiarity with satellite systems, robotics, industrial control, or other cyber‑physical test environments.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and CI/CD for service deployment.

Compensation

Location: Redmond, WA, USA.
Base salary range: $143,700 – $194,400 USD annually.
The Amazon package includes sign‑on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation is determined based on experience, qualifications, and location.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription).
• Basic Life & AD&D insurance with optional supplemental life plans.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and mental health support.
• Medical advice line.
• Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Adoption and surrogacy reimbursement coverage.
• 401(k) matching.
• Paid time off.
• Parental leave.