Sr. Software Engineer, EC2 VPC

About the role

Do you want to shape the future of virtualized networking in one of the world's largest public clouds? The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) NX Platforms team owns the packet processing pipeline running beneath every EC2 instance — adding encryption, firewalls (security groups), routing, billing, and monitoring to every packet on every host across our worldwide fleet of 9M+ hosts in more than 30 regions. Our vision: deliver bare-metal networking performance while raising the bar on EC2's security, availability, and reliability — unlocking capabilities only possible through true Software Defined Networking (SDN).

We are growing fast and looking for senior systems engineers who can deliver ultra-high performance — our goal is processing millions of packets per second on a single CPU core. This demands highly optimized data structures, low-level hardware tuning, and expertise in C/C++. If you have a passion for systems software engineering — kernel development, embedded systems, or high-performance networking — this is a unique opportunity to define the next generation of the platform powering all new EC2 instance families and VPC features for years to come.

Your code ships to production across the entire EC2 fleet — powering services like AWS Lambda and every external workload running on EC2. With frequent deployments and full ownership from design through operation, your contributions have immediate, measurable impact at global scale. With an extensive network and access to Principal, Sr. Principal, and Distinguished Engineers across EC2, AWS, and Amazon, there are many stretch opportunities to grow your skills and knowledge.

Key job responsibilities

• Being the lead engineer on a small team, mentoring junior engineers, ensuring the right development practices are followed.
• Be very hands-on; work with the engineering team to manage the day-to-day development activities by leading architecture decisions, participating in designs, design review, code review, and implementation.
• Maintain current technical knowledge to support rapidly changing technology, always on a look out for new technologies and work with management and development team in bringing new technologies.
• Communicating with users, other technical teams, and senior management to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical designs, and product strategy.

A day in the life

Our team puts a high value on work-life harmony. Striking a healthy balance between your personal and professional life is crucial to your happiness and success here.

About the team

Our team is dedicated to supporting new team members. Our team has a broad mix of experience levels and Amazon tenures, and we're building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship. Our senior engineers truly enjoy mentoring more junior engineers and engineers from non-traditional backgrounds through one-on-one mentoring and thorough, but kind, code reviews.

We care about your career growth. We try to assign projects and tasks based on what will help each team member develop into a better-rounded engineer and enable them to take on more complex tasks in the future.

Utility Computing (UC) provides product innovations — from foundational services such as Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), to consistently released new product innovations that continue to set AWS's services and features apart in the industry. As a member of the UC organization, you'll support the development and management of Compute, Database, Storage, Internet of Things (IoT), Platform, and Productivity Apps services in AWS, including support for customers who require specialized security solutions for their cloud services.

Basic qualifications

• 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
• Experience writing low level drivers, or experience in embedded development in C/C++

Preferred qualifications

• 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
• 4+ years of highly scalable systems experience
• Experience with embedded systems