Amazon.com Services LLC

Technology

Principal,SeniorPrincipalandDistinguishedEngineer,AWSDatabaseServices

$200–271k Seattle, Washington, United States FULL TIME
Market Sentiment
HIGH DEMAND

Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Senior candidates.

The Brief

“Principal, Senior Principal and Distinguished Engineer, AWS Database Services at Amazon.com Services LLC. Skills: Database services, AI-native applications, Distributed systems. Define architecture for services. Drive technical strategy”

Industry & Context.

Technology
Problems you'll solve

Solve hard problems; Solve distributed systems problems; Solve consistency models; Solve performance cliffs; Solve failure modes

What They're Looking For.

Must Have

Track record of technical decisions, Instinct to build first, Ability to influence without authority, Experience working across organizational boundaries, Comfort operating in ambiguity, Bias toward action, Curiosity about AI changing databases

Nice to Have

Deep expertise in distributed systems, Deep expertise in database internals, Deep expertise in storage engines, Deep expertise in query optimization, Deep expertise in replication protocols, Deep expertise in consensus algorithms, Deep expertise in high-performance systems

What You'll Do.

Define architecture for services

Drive technical strategy

Shape investment decisions

Shape direction of engineering teams

Solve distributed systems problems

Solve consistency models

Solve performance cliffs

Ship production systems

Raise bar for engineers

Engage directly with customers

Translate customer learnings

Evaluate emerging technologies

Prototype new approaches

Push boundaries of managed database services

Reshape database building

Reshape database querying

Reshape database operation

How You'll Work.

Team & Collaboration

Organizational boundaries

Full Job Description

You've spent your career solving hard problems. Here's one worth your next decade. The database is the heartbeat of every application ever built, and at AWS, we don't just run databases, we reinvent them. Our database products collectively serve hundreds of millions of workloads, process trillions of transactions, and store some of the most critical data on earth — making us the database infrastructure of the internet. AWS Database Services is a $17B+ business and one of the fastest-growing parts of AWS, where the problems are not incremental, the scale is not theoretical, and the stakes are genuinely high. You'll work alongside some of the most accomplished database engineers in the world, with access to infrastructure, data, and customer relationships that don't exist anywhere else — and the autonomy to define what "excellent" looks like, not just execute against someone else's definition of it. We're hiring multiple Principal Engineers across this portfolio, and we're looking for builders who want to shape products used by millions of real customers. What You'll Work On Three forces are reshaping this landscape right now: AI-assisted development is changing how engineers build on top of databases; agentic AI is creating entirely new requirements for low-latency, high-consistency data access; and the boundary between operational and analytical data is collapsing. You will be at the center of all three — not as an observer, but as an architect and builder. We're building a bench of exceptional technical leaders and matching each person to the area where their expertise and interests will have the most impact. Whether your passion is relational engines, NoSQL at planetary scale, graph traversal, time-series workloads, or the convergence of operational and analytical data — there is a home for you here. Our portfolio spans: • Amazon Aurora & RDS — The world's most widely deployed managed relational databases, serving enterprise workloads that cannot fail • Amazon Dyn

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