Senior Software Dev Engineer , AWS Elastic Container Service

About the role

AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) is building a new team in Seattle to dramatically accelerate how quickly containerized workloads become ready to run. This is a foundational performance challenge at massive scale - and we believe a step-function improvement is technically within reach.

The Workload Optimization team is a greenfield team tackling one of the most impactful challenges in container compute. As a Senior SDE, you will lead the system design and technical direction for low-latency container startup at massive scale. You'll work deep in the stack - Linux kernel, containerd/runc, Bottlerocket, and container networking - to reimagine the launch path from instance creation to workload execution.

Key job responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical roadmap for container start-up optimization at scale
• Drive system design across the container runtime, OS, and networking layers
• Mentor and grow a team of engineers building foundational infrastructure
• Work directly with senior ECS leadership to shape the future of Fargate performance
• Ensure strong operational practices across your team, including appropriate monitoring, telemetry, runbooks, and retrospective processes, while proactively identifying and resolving root causes of systemic issues.

A day in the life

• You start your morning reviewing operational metrics and addressing any alerts from overnight.
• By mid-morning, you are deep in a design discussion with engineers on your team, working through trade-offs for a new feature that spans multiple services.
• After lunch, you pair with a teammate on a tricky implementation, then join a cross-team architecture review where your expertise helps shape a shared interface.
• You wrap up the afternoon writing a technical design document and providing feedback on a colleague's code review.

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

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
• Experience building or operating container-based services, microservices platforms, or cloud infrastructure on AWS.
• Familiarity with container technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, or ECS.

Additional information

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If the country/region you're applying in isn't listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

Pay and benefits

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers 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.

USA, WA, Seattle - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually