Software Dev Engineer II, EBS Placement

Amazon • Seattle, WA

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Join the team that powers one of AWS's most critical services - Elastic Block Store (EBS)! The EBS Placement team builds systems that optimize how millions of storage volumes are distributed across AWS's vast infrastructure. Our work directly impacts every EBS customer, from startups to the world's largest enterprises, who rely on us to serve exabytes of data and trillions of I/Os daily.

We are seeking talented engineers to help evolve how we place EBS volumes on storage servers. We tackle complex technical challenges at massive scale - from optimizing storage density and improving I/O performance to ensuring data durability/availability in the face of multitude of failure modes. You'll work on distributed systems that make real-time decisions about where to place customer data while balancing multiple competing objectives including performance, availability, durability, and cost-effectiveness.

A day in the life
What makes this role exciting is that every day brings new challenges as customer workloads grows and storage technology evolves. You'll be at the forefront of ensuring that millions of chunks of data/workload are placed just right across vast EBS storage fleet.

Much of your time will be hands-on with our systems. You might be:
Designing and writing code to update placement decision engine for any number of reasons including launch of new storage feature, utilization of new server capability, adding/revising optimization functions and so on.
Diving into data to make design decisions or measure effectiveness of changes you make.
Reasoning about a wide range of factors in the decisions involved in above, such as variability of AWS infrastructure and customer workload patterns worldwide, complex interplay between competing optimization functions, diversify placement of data replicas, staleness in data used by decision engine etc.
Debugging complex distributed systems issues that require careful analysis and creative problem-solving.
Review proposals and code from peers from the team as well as partner teams.

Beyond these regular activities, you might find yourself providing consultation to partner teams on decisions like planning out product rollout and migrations, capacity planning, fast mitigation of customer impact with workload movement capabilities in placement systems, root-causing performance degradations and so on.

Requirements

• 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
• Experience programming with at least one software programming language

Nice To Haves

• 3+ 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 effectively using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Kiro, Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) to accelerate data analysis, software design, implementation, review, and investigation.

Responsibilities

• Designing and writing code to update placement decision engine for any number of reasons including launch of new storage feature, utilization of new server capability, adding/revising optimization functions and so on.
• Diving into data to make design decisions or measure effectiveness of changes you make.
• Reasoning about a wide range of factors in the decisions involved in above, such as variability of AWS infrastructure and customer workload patterns worldwide, complex interplay between competing optimization functions, diversify placement of data replicas, staleness in data used by decision engine etc.
• Debugging complex distributed systems issues that require careful analysis and creative problem-solving.
• Review proposals and code from peers from the team as well as partner teams.
• Providing consultation to partner teams on decisions like planning out product rollout and migrations, capacity planning, fast mitigation of customer impact with workload movement capabilities in placement systems, root-causing performance degradations and so on.

Benefits

• sign-on payments
• restricted stock units (RSUs)
• 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: Mid Level
• Education Level: Associate degree