Software Development Engineer (Elastic Kubernetes Service), EKS Scalability & Performance

Amazon • Seattle, WA

1d • $143,700 - $194,400 • Onsite

About The Position

We are looking for a Software Development Engineer to join the EKS KCP Scalability team and work on some of the hardest distributed systems problems at Amazon. You will design, build, and operate systems that directly determine whether EKS customers — from startups to the largest AI/ML workloads on the planet — experience a reliable, performant control plane. This is not a role where you implement features in isolation. You will work across the full stack: from the Kubernetes API server process and upstream community engagement, through autoscaling services that right-size control planes in real time, to the SLA measurement pipelines that hold us accountable to our customers. You will own systems end-to-end — from design through production operations — and your work will be measured by customer outcomes, not lines of code.

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
• 1+ years of software development engineer or related occupational experience
• 1+ years of designing and developing large-scale, multi-tiered, multi-threaded, embedded or distributed software applications, tools, systems, and services using: C#, C++, Java, or Perl experience
• 1+ years of Object Oriented Design experience
• Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
• 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

• Build and operate the Vertical Auto-Scaling Service (VAS) and its next-generation successor (VAS 2.0), which dynamically right-sizes EKS control planes by evaluating CPU/memory utilization, etcd throttle rates, node-count thresholds, and network utilization simultaneously.
• Work on the SLA measurement pipeline (MinutelySLA → DailySLA → MonthlySLA) that enforces EKS's uptime commitments, investigating breaching clusters weekly and building automation to detect and mitigate degradation before customers notice.
• Contribute to the control plane architecture for EKS Ultraclusters, defining how the API server, etcd, and associated components scale to support 100,000-node clusters running generative AI workloads.
• Maintain and extend version release qualification scale tests that gate every new Kubernetes version before it reaches customers.
• Engage with the upstream Kubernetes community — driving KEPs that work backwards from EKS customer requirements around performance, scale, and resiliency.
• Potentially work on workload identity systems (IRSA, EKS Pod Identity), Cluster Access Management, EC2 capacity management and grey failure detection, or Large-Scale Event response and weight shifting, depending on interests and team priorities.

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
• sign-on payments
• restricted stock units (RSUs)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level