Senior Software Engineer, Bottlerocket

About the role

We are looking for a Software Development Engineer to join the Bottlerocket team, where you'll build and evolve a purpose-built Linux-based operating system for running containers. Bottlerocket is fully open source and powers container workloads across Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and bare-metal environments at massive scale.

As an Senior SDE on this team, you will own significant components of the OS, from system services and update mechanisms to security hardening and package management. You'll design solutions that balance reliability, security, and performance for millions of container hosts, while collaborating openly with the broader community. This role combines deep systems programming with high-level architecture decisions, and your work will ship to customers as both open-source contributions and integrated AWS service features.

Key job responsibilities

• Design & build OS components - Develop and maintain core Bottlerocket subsystems (update engine, API server, host-container orchestration, settings management).
• Security-first development - Implement and maintain security features
• Open-source stewardship - Participate in upstream communities, review external contributions, publish RFCs, and maintain public documentation and tooling.
• Cross-team integration - Collaborate with internal and external partner teams to ensure Bottlerocket meets orchestrator requirements and customer needs.
• Operational excellence - Own the build and release pipeline (including Twoliter, the Bottlerocket build system), drive quality through automated testing, and support production rollouts.
• Mentorship & technical leadership - Raise the bar through design reviews, code reviews, and mentoring junior engineers on systems programming best practices.

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

• Knowledge of system performance, memory management, and parallel computing principles

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