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

What if you could build the cloud rather than just use it? As a System Development Engineer within our Route 53 team, you'll be part of the group that builds, operates, and assures the DNS infrastructure underpinning an entire sovereign cloud region - inventing and improving the systems that keep one of the world's most critical DNS services running.

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. This role sits at a unique intersection of software engineering and operational excellence, where operational problems become engineering opportunities and every recurring issue is a chance to automate.

The breadth of exposure you'll gain here - across AWS services, DNS at scale, and complex engineering challenges in a security-cleared, sovereign context - goes far beyond what a traditional service team role could offer, and your work will directly power Australia's national security capability.

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.

Key job responsibilities

You'll own the software services and platforms that keep Route 53's DNS infrastructure running within the programme - and you'll continuously reinvent them to be better, faster, and more resilient.

Your engineering work spans the full lifecycle. You'll manage service deployments, troubleshoot operational issues, and maintain service health - but you'll spend the majority of your time driving permanent solutions that eliminate recurring problems, developing automation that minimises human intervention and accelerates DNS change propagation, and collaborating with global service teams to enhance stability and functionality.

You'll design and implement DNS solutions that leverage Route 53's advanced capabilities - latency-based routing, Private DNS, Geo DNS, and zero-downtime failover - along with monitoring and tooling that surfaces anomalies before they become incidents. When technical issues arise, you'll investigate them thoroughly, diagnosing at the code or systems level, performing root-cause analysis, implementing long-term fixes, and articulating technical requirements back to service owners with clarity and precision.

Communication is central to your impact. You'll regularly interact with global service teams who have limited visibility into the environment, providing clear explanations of complex situations and building the relationships that ensure successful deployments and effective problem resolution.

A day in the life

Your morning begins with a health check across the services your team owns - reviewing deployment pipelines, scanning DNS monitoring dashboards, and confirming that overnight automated processes completed successfully. You notice a subtle shift in query patterns across one routing policy and begin investigating, tracing the issue through logs and system state to identify the root cause.

By mid-morning, you're deep in code. A recurring operational task has been consuming team hours, and you're building the automation that will eliminate it permanently and reduce DNS change propagation time. You're working across an unfamiliar codebase from a global service team, reading their implementation and developing a solution that integrates cleanly with their architecture while scaling to the unique demands of this environment.

After lunch, you join a collaboration session with a service team on the other side of the world preparing a major deployment, providing technical guidance on how their service will behave in this environment and agreeing on a plan that minimises risk. You then shift to development work on an in-house tool - perhaps a monitoring solution that gives the team better visibility into DNS health - designing the architecture, writing tests, and thinking through edge cases.

You end the day reviewing a pull request from a teammate and participating in your on-call handover, briefing the next engineer on current state and any items to watch. Tomorrow brings a new set of challenges - and that's exactly why you love this role.

About the team

The Region Services team redefines the way AWS designs, builds, and operates AWS regions to enable new AWS Cloud Infrastructure and Services offerings to customers across every industry and of every size, including start-ups, enterprises, and public sector organisations. The Route 53 team within this programme owns the full engineering lifecycle of DNS infrastructure for Australia's sovereign cloud - transforming complex operational challenges into scalable systems that enhance the reliability of one of the world's most critical DNS services.

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.

Basic qualifications

- Experience in automating, deploying, and supporting large-scale infrastructure

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

- Experience with Linux/Unix

- Experience with CI/CD pipelines build processes

- Knowledge of networking protocols such as HTTP, DNS and TCP/IP

Preferred qualifications

- Experience in Network protocols like DNS/DHCP/TCP, or experience in deploying identity and access management systems and experience in networking administration and troubleshooting

- Experience with distributed systems at scale

- Hands-on experience configuring well-known DNS server software such as BIND

- Experience with monitoring, observability, or incident management systems

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.