Software Development Engineer, AWS MemoryDB

Amazon • Vancouver, BC

9d

About The Position

This is an opportunity to join one of AWS's most foundational and high-impact engineering teams — the Data Plane team within Amazon ElastiCache and MemoryDB. We own the core in-memory engine that powers millions of customer workloads: the data path, durability layer, replication protocol, snapshot system, and advanced data structures. Our work sits at the intersection of systems programming, database internals, and performance engineering — every microsecond matters when you're serving the world's most latency-sensitive applications.

If you've ever found yourself deep in a conversation about write-ahead logs, copy-on-write fork semantics, lock-free data structures, or memory allocator design — and you want to apply those ideas to a system handling millions of operations per second at cloud scale — this team is where you belong. We build the engine behind Amazon MemoryDB, the only Valkey-compatible database that delivers in-memory speed with Multi-AZ durability. We're not just running an open-source cache; we're extending Valkey with novel capabilities — durable replication, active-active conflict resolution, full-text and vector search — while maintaining the sub-millisecond latencies our customers depend on.

Our customers include Disney+, Snap, Zoom, Lyft, Airbnb, and hundreds of thousands of other AWS customers who trust us with their most performance-critical workloads. You'll work in C/C++ at the lowest levels of the stack, solving problems in memory management, I/O optimization, replication protocols, and distributed data systems — all in production at massive scale.

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

Responsibilities

• Designing and building the next-generation in-memory database engine, delivering sub-millisecond latencies and millions of operations per second to the world's most demanding applications.
• Developing large-scale distributed in-memory storage systems in C/C++, extending open-source Valkey with durability, replication, and advanced data structure capabilities.
• Building and optimizing the durability layer — transaction logging, snapshotting, and replication protocols — that enables MemoryDB to deliver in-memory speed with Multi-AZ data protection.
• Designing and implementing advanced data structures and query capabilities including vector search and full-text search to support emerging workloads like generative AI.
• Driving performance engineering at the systems level — memory allocator tuning, I/O path optimization, and lock-free concurrency — to push throughput and latency boundaries.
• Contributing to active-active replication and conflict resolution mechanisms that enable globally distributed, low-latency data access.
• Mentoring and growing engineers on the team, serving as a technical leader and role model for engineering best practices.
• Managing individual project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables with a high degree of autonomy and accountability.

Benefits

• health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, basic life & AD&D insurance)
• Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP)
• Deferred Profit Sharing Plan (DPSP)
• paid time off
• other resources to improve health and well-being

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree