Principal Software Engineer - RDS, RDS Platform

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale relational databases in the cloud. Behind the scenes, a critical engineering challenge powers this service: delivering continuous software updates across one of the largest managed database fleets in the world, with minimal customer disruption.

As a Principal Engineer on our Database Fleet Management team, you will own the technical vision and architecture for how we deliver software updates at massive scale. You will drive innovation in patching orchestration, intelligent scheduling, deployment pipelines, and fleet lifecycle management. Your goal: increase delivery velocity while reducing customer impact to near zero. You will provide cross-cutting technical leadership across multiple engineering teams, influencing architecture decisions that span the full software delivery lifecycle from scheduling through execution to customer communication.

Key job responsibilities

Architect fleet update systems that deliver minimal-downtime software updates to millions of database instances across multiple engines, regions, and availability zones

Drive cross-cutting technical strategy across scheduling, orchestration, deployment, and customer experience, ensuring architectural coherence across multiple teams

Design and deliver highly scalable distributed systems with demanding availability, latency, and throughput requirements

Innovate on approaches to reduce update latency and customer impact through intelligent scheduling, automated safety mechanisms, and progressive rollout strategies

Raise the engineering bar across the organization through mentorship, operational excellence, design patterns, and architecture reviews

Partner with product and business stakeholders to translate customer pain points into technical strategy, balancing long-term platform investments with near-term delivery

Influence the broader AWS organization on fleet management, lifecycle automation, and software delivery best practices

About the team

You will work on systems that schedule, orchestrate, and execute millions of fleet maintenance operations, balancing service health requirements with customer preferences. The challenges include building intelligent scheduling at scale, orchestrating complex multi-step workflows across diverse database engines, deploying updates with minimal disruption, and communicating proactively with customers throughout the process.

We are a globally distributed team with engineers across Europe and the US, solving problems that directly impact hundreds of thousands of AWS customers every day.

Basic qualifications

- Experience designing, building, operating, and managing large-scale distributed systems or web services

- Experience leading the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems

- Experience with AWS technologies

- Experience leading engineering teams as a mentor or tech lead

- Experience developing and executing/delivering product and technical roadmaps

- 10+ years of engineering experience

Preferred qualifications

- Experience managing large server fleets

- Experience working cross functionally to implement and optimize workflows

- Experience with architecting highly available systems that utilize load balancing, horizontal scalability and high availability

- Experience with full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations

- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

- Experience with database internals, managed database services, or infrastructure automation

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