Kernel/OS Engineer, EC2 Nitro Instance Lifecycle Management
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 19, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 9, 2026. Amazon scores B on the Alion truth index.
EC2 Core Compute drives the planet’s largest, fastest growing and most feature-rich compute cloud. Nitro is AWS’ ground-up design for virtualization at global scale built on a fully custom stack of hardware, firmware and applications. Nitro has enabled EC2 to support Intel, AMD and Amazon’s custom silicon - the Graviton processor family - while raising the industry bar for security and performance across our product line. We integrate hardware, firmware, application software and services to deliver new virtualized and bare-metal compute platforms for companies from startups through the Fortune 500.
As a skilled engineer with expertise in C, you'll work on software that provide essential services to customer instances and EC2 dataplane applications. This role offers unique opportunities to design and build high-performance, reliable services that operate at massive scale to ensure customers are able to launch instances successfully while simultaneously protecting droplet resources from potential security threats.
This position requires an engineer who thrives in an embedded systems environment and can deliver robust solutions for the infrastructure that underpins AWS services. You'll help shape the future of cloud computing by creating efficient, scalable, and secure services that operate close to the hardware. Your contributions will directly impact customer experience and the performance of one of the world's largest cloud platforms.
Key job responsibilities
- You will be responsible for designing, developing, testing, and deploying large-scale software running across AWS data centers.
- You will collaborate closely with EC2 teams to help curate the team’s roadmap. You will also drive the system architecture, spearhead best practices that enable a quality product, and help coach and develop junior engineers.
- A successful candidate will have an established background in engineering large scale software systems, a strong technical ability, great communication skills, and a motivation to achieve results in a fast paced environment.
- Openness to leveraging AI tools and technologies to enhance productivity and technical problem-solving.
A day in the life
Your day begins with a quick team standup to align on priorities and discuss any operational issues that need attention. You'll spend time designing new components for our embedded services or enhancing existing ones, writing efficient code in C or Rust, and collaborating with teammates on technical reviews. You might debug complex issues affecting service performance, optimize critical paths in the codebase, or work on improving security mechanisms. Throughout the day, you'll coordinate with partner teams to ensure smooth integration between services and regularly validate that your solutions meet the high reliability standards required for AWS infrastructure.
About the team
We play critical role in managing EC2 instances that utilize the Nitro system. We handle a diverse set of responsibilities related to the lifecycle, and hardware management of EC2 instances. The team owns key responsibilities that includes EC2 Instances life cycle management on the Nitro platform to manage instance creation, execution and termination by coordinating with other on-instance components such as Hypervisor, Networking and Storage services. We're passionate about solving challenging problems at the intersection of hardware and software, creating high-performance services that operate at massive scale.
Basic qualifications
- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- Professional experience working on the Linux Kernel
- Professional experience in C programming
- Proficient in at least one CPU architecture such as x86 or ARM
- Understanding of operating system internals
Preferred qualifications
- Extensive professional experience working on the Linux Kernel
- Extensive professional experience in C programming
- Professional experience working on a hypervisor, such as kvm, xen or hyper-v
- Solid understanding of performance-critical areas of the Linux Kernel
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
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.
USA, WA, Seattle - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually