Principal, Senior Principal and Distinguished Engineer, AWS Database Services

Amazon; East Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 311,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) matching

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Amazon is seeking Principal Engineers to own architecture for scalable, fault-tolerant database services. You will lead design decisions, drive roadmaps, and mentor teams while engaging directly with customers managing critical workloads.

You will shape how AI reshapes managed database platforms, collaborating across relational, NoSQL, and streaming workloads at planetary scale. The role demands deep systems expertise and strong leadership.

Qualifications

• Proven track record making decisions at scale under pressure
• Ability to prototype quickly, ship to validate and iterate
• Influence across teams without formal authority
• Experience driving outcomes across organizational boundaries
• Comfort operating in ambiguity with decisive action
• Curiosity about AI changing how databases are built and used

Responsibilities

• Define architecture for highly available, scalable services
• Drive technical strategy and roadmap across service areas
• Solve distributed systems and data consistency challenges
• Build and ship production systems trusted by large enterprises
• Mentor engineers and raise technical standards
• Engage with customers to translate feedback into better design
• Experiment with emerging technologies and AI-enabled approaches

Skills

Technical ownership

Prototype to learn

Influence without authority

Cross-functional collaboration

Ambiguity tolerance

Curiosity about AI in databases

Tools

Distributed systems

Database internals

Storage engines

Job description

Description

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.

Key job responsibilities

As a Principal Engineer, you are a technical owner — not a consultant, not a reviewer. You will:

• 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

Basic Qualifications

What We're Looking For

We're not looking for one type of engineer. We're looking for depth, judgment, and the drive to own hard problems. Across our openings, we value:

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

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

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.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

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 .

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