Principal Engineer | Multiple Locations, USA, Global Specialty Recruiting Team

Amazon Inc.; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 311,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon EC2 Principal Engineer roles shape the company’s senior technical leadership, setting standards and driving architecture for global cloud services at scale and across multiple locations in the USA. You will mentor engineers, lead cross-functional initiatives, decompose complex problems, optimize performance, and ensure robust, scalable systems while pioneering new approaches.

This role offers broad impact on customers worldwide, with startup-like urgency, an emphasis on ownership,

Qualifications

• 12+ years of hands-on professional engineering development experience
• Technical leadership and mentorship experience of engineering teams

Responsibilities

• Lead and influence cross-functional projects across large distributed systems.
• Decompose complex problems into scalable solutions.
• Fully and completely understand system inter-dependencies and limitations.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to career growth within the team.
• Drive performance, scalability, and engineering best practices in enterprise architecture.
• Balance technical leadership with strong business judgment to guide technology choices.

Skills

Hands-on engineering

Technical leadership

Job description

Principal Engineer | Multiple Locations, USA, Global Specialty Recruiting Team

Job ID: 10581965 | Amazon.com Services LLC

At Amazon, Principal Engineers are both organizational leaders and hands‑on builders. As Amazon’s most senior individual contributors, Principal Engineers work on our hardest problems, help establish technical standards and drive the overall technical architecture, engineering practices, and engineering methodologies for products that delight our customers. While many companies this size take their foot‑off the gas pedal, at Amazon, it’s still Day 1. This startup mentality does not admit the luxury of a conservative approach.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is one of the foundational services of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a cornerstone of modern cloud computing. Since launching in 2006, EC2 has provided secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud — giving customers virtual servers ("instances") with complete control over their computing resources and the broadest choice of processor, storage, networking, and operating system configurations.

Today, EC2 operates at extraordinary scale, serving millions of customers worldwide — from individual developers to the largest enterprises and public‑sector organizations. It offers thousands of instance types optimized for virtually every workload, spanning general‑purpose, compute‑, memory‑, storage‑, and accelerator‑optimized use cases across multiple CPU architectures (including AWS’s own Graviton processors) and GPU‑powered instances for large‑scale AI and machine learning.

What the EC2 Organization Builds

• Compute & virtualization — the virtual server platform that powers a vast portion of the internet, including the AWS Nitro System, AWS’s custom hardware and lightweight hypervisor technology that delivers performance, security, and isolation at hyperscale.
• Networking — high‑performance networking infrastructure and services that move enormous volumes of traffic securely, reliably, and efficiently across the AWS cloud.
• Custom silicon & hardware — purpose‑built chips and hardware (such as Graviton and Nitro cards) that advance performance, efficiency, and cost‑effectiveness.
• AI & accelerated computing — next‑generation instances engineered for training and serving large‑scale AI models, with cutting‑edge networking and GPU/accelerator capabilities.
• Scalability, availability & operational excellence — the systems and tooling that keep these services fault‑tolerant, highly available, and continuously improving at global scale.

If you have a background in developing large‑scale distributed systems, or are a specialist in any of the following areas, we would love to review your application:

• Compute virtualization
• Server provisioning and fleet management
• High‑performance data plane engineering
• Control plane and orchestration systems
• Networking
• Cloud infrastructure at scale

Key job responsibilities

• Serve as a technical leader on our most demanding, cross‑functional projects.
• Functionally decompose complex problems into simple, straight‑forward solutions.
• Fully and completely understand system inter‑dependencies and limitations.
• Possess expert knowledge in performance, scalability, enterprise system architecture, and engineering best practices.
• Assist in the career development of others, actively mentoring individuals and the community on advanced technical issues and helping managers guide the career growth of their team members.
• Exert technical influence over multiple teams, increasing their productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience. You are a leader, builder and an operator.
• Balance technical leadership and savvy with strong business judgment to make the right decisions about technology choices.

About the team

EC2 is foundational infrastructure that a significant share of the digital world depends on. The organization combines the pace and ownership of a startup with the scale and reach of AWS, giving engineers the rare opportunity to make decisions that impact customers globally. It’s an environment built for people who want to solve hard, ambiguous problems in distributed systems, virtualization, networking, security, performance, and AI infrastructure — and to see their work operate at a scale few other places can offer.

Basic Qualifications

• 12+ years of hands‑on professional engineering development experience
• Technical leadership and mentorship experience of engineering teams

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep hands‑on technical expertise in at least one major technical area: large scale full stack development, building distributed systems, designing massive global networks, embedded systems or complex hardware

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

USA, CA, San Diego - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually

USA, CA, Sunnyvale - 230,100.00 - 311,200.00 USD annually

USA, NY, New York - 220,100.00 - 297,700.00 USD annually

USA, VA, Herndon - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually

USA, WA, Seattle - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status. Veterans, military spouses, and people with disabilities are encouraged to apply.