Principal, Senior Principal and Distinguished Engineer, AWS Database Services

Youve spent your career solving hard problems. Heres one worth your next decade.

The database is the heartbeat of every application ever built and at AWS we dont just run databases we reinvent them. Our database products collectively serve hundreds of millions of workloads process trillions of transactions and store some of the most critical data on earth making us the database infrastructure of the internet. AWS Database Services is a $17B business and one of the fastest-growing parts of AWS where the problems are not incremental the scale is not theoretical and the stakes are genuinely high. Youll work alongside some of the most accomplished database engineers in the world with access to infrastructure data and customer relationships that dont exist anywhere else and the autonomy to define what excellent looks like not just execute against someone elses definition of it. Were hiring multiple Principal Engineers across this portfolio and were looking for builders who want to shape products used by millions of real customers.

What Youll Work On

Three forces are reshaping this landscape right now: AI-assisted development is changing how engineers build on top of databases; agentic AI is creating entirely new requirements for low-latency high-consistency data access; and the boundary between operational and analytical data is collapsing. You will be at the center of all three not as an observer but as an architect and builder.

Were building a bench of exceptional technical leaders and matching each person to the area where their expertise and interests will have the most impact. Whether your passion is relational engines NoSQL at planetary scale graph traversal time-series workloads or the convergence of operational and analytical data there is a home for you here.

Our portfolio spans:

Amazon Aurora & RDS The worlds most widely deployed managed relational databases serving enterprise workloads that cannot fail

Amazon DynamoDB A single-digit millisecond NoSQL engine operating at a scale most engineers will never encounter anywhere else

Amazon DocumentDB MongoDB-compatible document storage built for the cloud

Amazon Neptune Graph database powering knowledge graphs fraud detection and recommendation engines at scale

Amazon ElastiCache & MemoryDB In-memory data stores where microseconds matter

Amazon Timestream Purpose-built time-series for IoT DevOps and industrial telemetry

Amazon Keyspaces Serverless Cassandra-compatible storage at AWS scale

We are building the database infrastructure for the next generation of AI-native applications. If thats the problem you want to work on we want to talk.

Key job responsibilities
What Youll Do
As a Principal Engineer you are a technical owner not a consultant not a reviewer. You will:

Define architecture for services that cannot go down cannot lose data and must scale to meet demand that grows faster than most companies ever see

Drive technical strategy across your service area shaping roadmap investment decisions and the direction of engineering teams

Solve the unsolved the distributed systems problems the consistency models the performance cliffs the failure modes that dont have a textbook answer yet

Build prototype and ship from early-stage experiments and proof-of-concepts to production systems trusted by the worlds largest enterprises

Raise the bar for the engineers around you through design reviews mentorship and the kind of technical judgment that only comes from having done this before

Engage directly with customers running their most critical workloads on your systems and translate what you learn into better architecture

Invent evaluate emerging technologies prototype new approaches and push the boundaries of what managed database services can do including how AI reshapes the way databases are built queried and operated






What Were Looking For

Were not looking for one type of engineer. Were looking for depth judgment and the drive to own hard problems. Across our openings we value:

A track record of technical decisions that held up at scale under pressure over time

The instinct to build first: you prototype to learn ship to validate and iterate without waiting for perfect conditions

The ability to influence without authority and earn trust through technical credibility

Experience working across organizational boundaries to drive outcomes that no single team could achieve alone

Comfort operating in ambiguity and a bias toward action

Curiosity about how AI is changing the way engineers build on and with databases and the drive to be ahead of that curve not behind it





Deep expertise in one or more of: distributed systems database internals storage engines query optimization replication protocols consensus algorithms or high-performance systems

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status disability or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees supervisors and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees supervisors and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal state and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct adverse and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies exercise sound judgment effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism and safeguard business operations and the Companys reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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 for more information. If the country/region youre applying in isnt listed please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience qualifications and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical dental vision prescription Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans EAP Mental Health Support Medical Advice Line Flexible Spending Accounts Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage) 401(k) matching paid time off and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at CA East Palo Alto - 230100.00 - 311200.00 USD annually
USA WA BELLEVUE - 200100.00 - 270600.00 USD annually
USA WA Bellevue - 200100.00 - 270600.00 USD annually
USA WA REDMOND - 200100.00 - 270600.00 USD annually
USA WA Redmond - 200100.00 - 270600.00 USD annually
USA WA SEATTLE - 200100.00 - 270600.00 USD annually
USA WA Seattle - 200100.00 - 270600.00 USD annually