Senior Systems Engineer – Open-Source Container OS

Amazon; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 168,000 - 227,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon is seeking a Software Development Engineer to join the Bottlerocket team, crafting a Linux-based OS for containers and contributing to open-source projects. You’ll own core OS components, security hardening, and scalable design for millions of container hosts.

As an L6 SDE, you’ll drive architecture decisions, mentor junior engineers, and collaborate with internal and external teams to deliver updates, container orchestration, and tooling across AWS services.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience.
• 5+ years of programming in at least one language.
• 5+ years of leading design or architecture of systems.
• Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team.
• Knowledge of system performance, memory management and parallel computing.
• Experience with open source tools and resources

Responsibilities

• Design & build OS components — Develop and maintain core Bottlerocket subsystems (update engine, API server, host-container orchestration, settings management).
• Security-first development — Implement and maintain security features.
• Open-source stewardship — Participate in upstream communities, review external contributions, publish RFCs, and maintain public documentation and tooling.
• Cross-team integration — Collaborate with internal and external partner teams to ensure Bottlerocket meets orchestrator requirements and customer needs.
• Operational excellence — Own the build and release pipeline (including Twoliter, the Bottlerocket build system), drive quality through automated testing, and support production rollouts.
• Mentorship & technical leadership — Raise the bar through design reviews, code reviews, and mentoring junior engineers on systems programming best practices.

Skills

OS design & systems programming

Mentorship & technical leadership

Linux background

Open source involvement

Performance optimization

Tools

Twoliter build system

Linux tooling

Job description

Amazon is seeking a Software Development Engineer to join the Bottlerocket team, crafting a Linux-based OS for containers and contributing to open-source projects. You’ll own core OS components, security hardening, and scalable design for millions of container hosts.

As an L6 SDE, you’ll drive architecture decisions, mentor junior engineers, and collaborate with internal and external teams to deliver updates, container orchestration, and tooling across AWS services.