Principal, Senior Principal and Distinguished Engineer, AWS Database Services

Amazon • East Palo Alto, CA

1d

About The Position

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 DynamoDB — A single-digit millisecond NoSQL engine operating at a scale
most engineers will never encounter anywhere else

Amazon DocumentDB — MongoDB-compatible document storage built for the cloud

Amazon Neptune — Graph database powering knowledge graphs, fraud detection, and
recommendation engines at scale

Amazon ElastiCache & MemoryDB — In-memory data stores where microseconds matter

Amazon Timestream — Purpose-built time-series for IoT, DevOps, and industrial
telemetry

Amazon Keyspaces — Serverless Cassandra-compatible storage at AWS scale

We are building the database infrastructure for the next generation of AI-native
applications. If that's the problem you want to work on, we want to talk.

Requirements

• A track record of technical decisions that held up — at scale, under pressure, over time
• The instinct to build first: you prototype to learn, ship to validate, and iterate without waiting for perfect conditions
• The ability to influence without authority and earn trust through technical credibility
• Experience working across organizational boundaries to drive outcomes that no single team could achieve alone
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and a bias toward action
• Curiosity about how AI is changing the way engineers build on and with databases — and the drive to be ahead of that curve, not behind it

Nice To Haves

• Deep expertise in one or more of: distributed systems, database internals, storage engines, query optimization, replication protocols, consensus algorithms, or high-performance systems

Responsibilities

• Define architecture for services that cannot go down, cannot lose data, and must scale to meet demand that grows faster than most companies ever see
• Drive technical strategy across your service area, shaping roadmap, investment decisions, and the direction of engineering teams
• Solve the unsolved — the distributed systems problems, the consistency models, the performance cliffs, the failure modes that don't have a textbook answer yet
• Build, prototype, and ship — from early-stage experiments and proof-of-concepts to production systems trusted by the world's largest enterprises
• Raise the bar for the engineers around you through design reviews, mentorship, and the kind of technical judgment that only comes from having done this before
• Engage directly with customers running their most critical workloads on your systems — and translate what you learn into better architecture
• Invent — evaluate emerging technologies, prototype new approaches, and push the boundaries of what managed database services can do, including how AI reshapes the way databases are built, queried, and operated

Benefits

• 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
• parental leave

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed