Software Development Engineer, RDS SQL Server

RDS provides customers with databases that have multiple-nines of durability and availability. Achieving this level of reliability requires building control and monitoring systems that automatically detect and handle many types of failures within seconds, and data replication options that accommodate various geographical distribution and disaster recovery objectives. The challenge is further heightened by needing to handle huge numbers of databases, multiple database engines (RDS supports MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MariaDB, and Amazon Aurora), and a wide variety of customer workloads.

This role is for the AWS RDS for SQL Server team. SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. Amazon RDS for SQL Server makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale SQL Server deployments in the cloud. For more information on RDS SQL Server, please visit: http://aws.amazon.com/rds/sqlserver

To achieve our goals in this area, we are looking for a Software Engineer who loves to dive in and solve fundamental Computer Science and Systems problems around performance, timing, state machine logic and distributed systems algorithms. Candidates need to have a strong sense of ownership, passion to provide a great customer experience and excellent troubleshooting skills even when in high-pressure situations. If you'd like to be a part of creating always-on databases in the AWS cloud, this is the job for you!

Key job responsibilities

- Independently own the full lifecycle of features - from gathering requirements and writing design documents through implementation, testing, deployment, and production support - delivering end-to-end with minimal guidance from your manager.

- Write efficient, maintainable, and production-ready code that meets the team's high bar for reliability and scale, while actively driving design reviews and providing constructive technical feedback that elevates the overall quality of the codebase.

- Break down ambiguous, loosely-defined problems into clear actionable plans, make sound technical trade-offs between short-term delivery and long-term sustainability, and influence your team's architectural direction and engineering best practices without waiting for explicit direction.

- Mentor and grow junior engineers through thoughtful code reviews, design guidance, while actively contributing to the team's hiring bar as an interviewer and raising the overall engineering capability of the team.

- Work backwards from customer needs to identify, prioritize, and ship improvements that meaningfully enhance the experience for millions of users, collaborating cross-functionally with partner teams across multiple geographies to deliver results.

A day in the life

As a software engineer in this team, you'll spend the majority of your time hands-on coding while growing your ability to influence your team's technical direction. Day-to-day, you're designing and implementing features, reviewing code from peers, debugging production issues, and writing design documents to align your team on approach. You own features end-to-end within your charter area: translating requirements into working systems, making trade-off calls between delivery speed and long-term quality, and mentoring junior engineers along the way. It's a strong IC role with increasing leadership expectations - you're expected to deliver independently, operate what you build, and propose the path forward even when requirements are ambiguous.

About the team

We're the team behind Amazon RDS for SQL Server - making it ridiculously easy for customers to run SQL Server in the cloud without wrestling with infrastructure. We tackle gnarly distributed systems challenges (automated failover, zero-downtime patching, scaling at cloud speed) for customers ranging from scrappy startups to Fortune 500 giants. The culture? Collaborative, high-ownership, and refreshingly low on bureaucracy - we ship fast, learn from our customers, and actually enjoy the work. If you like solving puzzles that millions of people quietly depend on every day, you'll fit right in.

Basic qualifications

- Experience (non-internship) in professional software development

- Experience designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems

- Experience programming with at least one software programming language

- Knowledge of professional software engineering & best practices for full software development life cycle, including coding standards, software architectures, code reviews, source control management, continuous deployments, testing, and operational excellence

Preferred qualifications

- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

- Experience in debugging, profiling, and implementing software engineering best practices in large-scale systems

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