Senior Principal Engineer, EC2 Core Compute

EC2 Core Compute is hiring a Senior Principal Engineer to own the technical direction of the platforms and the virtualization stack behind the EC2 general-purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized and burstable instance families. The organization launches the C, M, R, X and T instance families across Intel, AMD and AWS Graviton processors and delivers the Nitro Hypervisor that runs them. It also engineers the bare metal variants that customers use to move the last of their on-premises workloads to AWS. Engineering teams in Berlin, Seattle and other locations around the globe contribute to every launch, and this role is the single technical owner who makes those teams build one coherent platform.

You will report directly to the Director of EC2 Core Compute and sit with the EC2 team in Berlin. You set the multi-year technical direction for the organization, you own the architectural decisions that cross Director and VP boundaries inside EC2, and you grow engineers across every tenure level, from new graduates to Principal Engineers. You stay hands-on: you read and produce code, you review the designs that decide how a new processor generation becomes an instance family, and you take the hardest production investigations yourself.

You need to understand how virtualization works, from the processor and the platform firmware to the hypervisor and the software that operates it, and you need to contribute to the software and firmware components yourself.

Key job responsibilities

1. Own part of the technical strategy for EC2 Core Compute and set multi-year direction with specific yearly production deliverables that the Director, the Principal Engineers and the engineering managers execute against.

2. Define how a new processor generation from Intel, AMD or AWS Graviton becomes an EC2 platform: hardware specification review, firmware and hypervisor enablement, qualification, launch and fleet support. Balance time to market, performance and cost, with security as the top priority in every decision.

3. Influence the architecture of the Nitro System as a whole, from the Linux kernel the hypervisor is built on to the firmware and services around it, so that every part evolves in one coherent direction.

4. Set the engineering standard for how the organization builds systems software. Choose languages, tools and practices with judgment for the problem at hand, and hold every component to the same bar for security, performance and maintainability.

5. Improve the way the organization operates, maintains, monitors and automates its software and services, so that it delivers faster and with higher quality.

6. Lead the deepest and most challenging production investigations, and turn each root cause into a durable architectural or process change.

7. Represent EC2 Core Compute in EC2-level and AWS-level architecture and security reviews, and influence the silicon, firmware, hardware, control plane and security organizations we depend on to align their roadmaps with ours.

8. Grow engineers at every tenure level through design reviews, code reviews and direct mentorship. Serve as a Principal Engineer Bar Raiser and raise the hiring bar across the organization.

9. Write the documents that shape investment: multi-year plans with yearly production deliverables, architecture decision records and post-incident analyses read by Directors and VPs.

A day in the life

Your day moves between design reviews with the Berlin teams, decisions on security findings and production issues, and handoffs with teams in the United States and other locations. You spend a meaningful part of every week in code, in designs and in production data. You write, because at this level the documents you produce are the mechanism that aligns the organization. You are the engineer the Director calls when the answer decides a launch.

About the team

EC2 Core Compute has a two-fold mission: leave no customer workload on-premises by engineering new EC2 instance families, and build the most secure, feature-rich and robust virtualization technology in the cloud. The organization is based in Berlin and Seattle, with engineering teams in other locations around the globe, and works under a vertical ownership model where each engineer owns a technology-specific area globally regardless of location.

Security is our top priority, performance never regresses for customers, and improvements reach customers without action on their part.

Basic qualifications

1. Master of Science in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or a related field.

2. Extensive career in systems software or infrastructure engineering as the senior-most technical leader of a multi-team organization, with a demonstrated record of influencing engineers, executives and product managers and of growing engineers at every tenure level.

3. Deep understanding of virtualization: CPU and memory virtualization, IOMMU, device passthrough and emulation, PCIe, and the interaction between hypervisor, firmware and hardware.

4. Deep understanding of virtualization security: isolation boundaries, the attack surface of hypervisor and firmware, and the mitigation of hardware and software vulnerabilities.

5. Expert-level systems programming in production software such as operating system kernels, hypervisors, device drivers or firmware, with the judgment to choose languages and tools for the problem at hand.

6. Experience building, shipping and operating an infrastructure platform end to end, and improving how an organization operates, monitors and automates its services.

Preferred qualifications

1. Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or a related field.

2. Experience with the Linux kernel as a contributor or maintainer, or with sustaining a downstream kernel against upstream releases.

3. Experience with KVM, Xen, Hyper-V or another production hypervisor, or with the firmware and platform layers that support one.

4. Experience enabling new silicon with processor vendors: pre-production hardware, errata, microcode and firmware.

5. Experience with confidential computing technologies such as memory encryption, attestation and trusted execution environments.

6. Experience with platform-level performance engineering, including NUMA, cache and memory bandwidth behavior.

7. Proficiency in both x86 and ARM64 architectures.

8. Experience influencing architecture beyond your own VP organization, with a record of technical decisions that held up over multiple years.

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