System Development Engineer, Pyxis ADC
About the role
This is an excellent opportunity to join Amazon's world-class technical team at HQ2 in Arlington, VA, working with some of the best and brightest engineers while developing your skills and furthering your career within one of the most innovative technology companies anywhere.
About the team
AWS Infrastructure Services owns the design, planning, delivery, and operation of all AWS global infrastructure. We support all AWS data centers and all of the servers, storage, networking, power, and cooling equipment that ensure our customers have continual access to the innovation they rely on. You'll join a diverse team of software, hardware, and network engineers, supply chain specialists, security experts, operations managers, and other vital roles. You'll collaborate with people across AWS to help us deliver the highest standards for safety and security while providing seemingly infinite capacity at the lowest possible cost for our customers. You'll experience an inclusive culture that welcomes bold ideas and empowers you to own them to completion.
What you'll do
Amazon Software Builder Experience (ASBX) Pyxis ADC provides the foundational services that every Amazon builder depends on to develop, deploy, and operate software from continuous deployment orchestration to testing infrastructure and configuration management. Our team owns and operates critical ASBX services across Amazon's most secure and isolated environments, including Apollo (deployment), Pipelines (continuous delivery), Test on Demand/Hydra (integration testing), AppConfig (feature management), Multi-Region (resource replication), Builder MCP, and AIM (AI agent infrastructure). We ensure these services maintain parity, reliability, and security across all partitions.
A successful Engineer joining the team will do much more than write code and triage problems. They will operate services at scale in air-gapped environments where standard commercial tooling doesn't exist, drive cross-partition deployment parity, and build the automation that keeps Amazon's most sensitive workloads shipping safely. They will dive deep into complex distributed systems issues and work diligently to improve the builder experience.
Your day
You start the morning reviewing deployment health across isolated regions, checking alarms and on-call handoffs. Mid-morning, you're deep in a code review for a cross-partition automation fix, then jump into a design discussion on how to bring a new ASBX service capability to air-gapped environments. After lunch, you troubleshoot a deployment pipeline issue, tracing it from orchestration logs to a configuration mismatch, and ship the fix before end of day. Between the technical depth and the autonomy to own problems end-to-end, no two days look the same.
Ideal candidate
- Great fun to work with – you love what you do and instinctively know how to make work fun
- Strong Linux & networking fundamentals – deep experience working with Linux in large-scale, distributed environments; understanding of networking technology and how services communicate across isolated boundaries; regularly participate in deep-dive troubleshooting and technical post-mortem discussions to identify root causes of complex issues
- Love to code – whether building deployment automation, creating AI-powered operational tooling, or solving complex cross-partition orchestration problems; solid understanding of software development methodology and CI/CD practices
- Think big – build and deploy solutions that enable thousands of Amazon builders to ship software reliably across multiple isolated regions; strive to improve and streamline processes to allow delivery at massive scale
Security clearance
This position requires that the candidate selected must currently possess and maintain an active TS/SCI security clearance. The position further requires that, after start, the selected candidate obtain and maintain an active TS/SCI security clearance with polygraph or commensurate clearance for each government agency for which they perform AWS work.
Basic qualifications
- 2+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 1+ years of designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- 7+ years of administrative experience in networking, storage systems, operating systems and hands-on systems engineering experience
- Bachelor's degree, or CSSLP (Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional)
- Knowledge of systems engineering fundamentals (networking, storage, operating systems)
- Experience programming with at least one modern language such as C++, C#, Java, Python, Golang, PowerShell, Ruby
- Current, active US Government Security Clearance of Top Secret with SCI eligibility or above
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with PowerShell (preferred), Python, Ruby, or Java
- Experience working in an Agile environment using the Scrum methodology
Pay and benefits
- Base salary range: $129,200.00 – $174,800.00 USD annually
- Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs)
- Comprehensive benefits including 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, and parental leave