System Development Engineer, Route 53

G'day! You've found an opportunity that could define your next chapter.

Applicants must be Australian citizens and hold or be eligible to obtain an Australian Government Security Clearance with the ability to successfully complete an Organisational Suitability Assessment. More information regarding security clearances can be found at https://www.agsva.gov.au/.

The Mission - Why This Program, Why Now?

You're joining at the defining moment of one of the most significant technology programmes Australia has ever undertaken. This programme will build and operate the dedicated cloud giving Australia's national security community and its allies the capability to see more, share more, innovate and act faster than ever before.

The architectural decisions being made now - how we structure networking, implement security controls, and automate at scale - will shape how Australia's national security community operates for the next decade. You won't be inheriting someone else's design choices. You'll be making them.

Your Opportunity

Picture yourself at the intersection of sovereign cloud innovation and one of the world's most critical DNS infrastructures. As a Systems Development Engineer within our Region Services team, you'll be redefining how AWS designs, builds, and operates cloud regions - enabling new infrastructure and services offerings that serve customers across every industry, from ambitious start-ups to the public sector organisations safeguarding our nation.

Route 53 isn't just another DNS service - it's the nervous system of the internet operating across 50+ global locations with a 100% availability SLA. You'll be engineering latency-based routing, Private DNS architectures, Geo DNS solutions, and failover mechanisms that millions depend on without ever knowing your name. The distributed systems you'll build here are among the largest and most complex on the planet, and the challenges waiting for you are the kind that make exceptional engineers come alive.

Whether you choose Melbourne or Sydney as your home base, you'll join a team of adaptable, passionate engineers who thrive on complexity and refuse to accept "good enough." Your technical expertise and development abilities will drive innovation that echoes far beyond a single service - you'll be shaping how Australia's sovereign cloud capability operates for a generation.

Key job responsibilities

- Support the refinement of system requirements, participate in the development and delivery of operability-related features such as system health monitoring, diagnostics, repair, and other self-healing automation

- Develop or further existing application and system management tools and processes that reduce manual efforts and increase overall efficiency

- Adapt and improve operations management systems and processes to accommodate rapid and increasing growth in systems and traffic

- Participate in the design and execution of production acceptance tests and new hardware evaluations

- Monitor the health of the fleet, automating system health, maintenance tasks, and reporting systems as needed

- Participate in “on-call” rotations to resolve incidents occurring out-of-hours.

A day in the life

Your morning begins with a glance at the fleet health dashboard - built by you, refined by you, trusted by the team. Overnight, a self-healing automation you deployed last week detected and resolved a disk utilisation issue across twelve hosts without triggering a single page. You smile, note the metrics, and move on.

Mid-morning, you're writing code. A new service is preparing for production acceptance, and you're developing the health monitoring and diagnostic tooling that will give the team visibility from day one. You design the checks to be comprehensive but efficient - catching real problems without generating noise. You write tests, validate against a staging environment, and open a pull request.

After lunch, you tackle a scaling challenge. Traffic patterns have shifted, and one of your reporting systems is approaching its throughput limits. You refactor the data pipeline, implement a more efficient aggregation strategy, and validate that it handles three times the current load without breaking a sweat. This is the kind of forward-thinking engineering that keeps the platform ahead of its growth curve.

Later, you pair with a teammate on a new technology evaluation. Together, you design acceptance tests that will stress the technology under realistic conditions, measuring performance, reliability, and failure modes. Your test framework is reusable - next time a new hardware variant arrives, the team can evaluate it in hours rather than days.

Before wrapping up, you review an alert that fired during your on-call shift last week. The incident was resolved quickly, but you see an opportunity: a new self-healing automation that would handle this class of issue automatically. You sketch the logic, estimate the effort, and add it to your backlog. Tomorrow, you'll start building it - and the fleet will be stronger for it.

About the team

Diverse Experiences

Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.

Why AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating - that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses.

Work/Life Balance

We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud.

Inclusive Team Culture

AWS values curiosity and connection. Our employee-led and company-sponsored affinity groups promote inclusion and empower our people to take pride in what makes us unique. Our inclusion events foster stronger, more collaborative teams. Our continual innovation is fueled by the bold ideas, fresh perspectives, and passionate voices our teams bring to everything we do.

Mentorship and Career Growth

We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.

Benefits

- Learning & development - AWS training and certification support, access to internal learning platforms.

- Health, income protection and life cover - Amazon subsidises private health insurance premiums, and group salary continuance and life insurance are included at no cost to you.

- Military differential pay launching in Australia - Australian employees taking defence reserve leave may receive up to 52 weeks of military differential pay to help cover the difference in pay while serving.

- Employee Assistance Program - Free, confidential support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for you and your family - mental health, financial coaching, legal questions, and everyday life events.

- Family-building benefit - Access to Maven for fertility treatment, adoption support, surrogacy, and parenting coaching.

- Amazon Extras & employee discount - cashback and discounts across hundreds of retail, fitness, travel, and lifestyle partners.

Basic qualifications

- Experience in automating, deploying, and supporting infrastructure

- Experience programming with at least one modern language such as Python, Ruby, Golang, Java, C++, C#, Rust

- Experience with Linux/Unix

- 1+ years of contributing to automation for new and current system experience

Preferred qualifications

- Experience with CI/CD pipelines build processes

- Experience operating 24x7 high-availability, distributed software applications and performance tuning software applications and optimizing fleet utilization

- Understanding of network fundamentals (DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP, routing, load balancing, load shedding) and experience with monitoring frameworks (such as CloudWatch, Datadog, Grafana, Elastic or similar)

- Experience scripting operating system tasks in Bash, Python, etc. and with Infrastructure as Code, (such as CDK, CloudFormation, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or similar)

Acknowledgement of country:

In the spirit of reconciliation Amazon acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.

IDE statement:

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.