KernelOS Engineer, EC2 Nitro Instance Lifecycle Management

EC2 Nitro drives the planets largest fastest growing and most feature-rich compute cloud. Nitro is AWS ground-up design for virtualization at global scale built on a fully custom stack of hardware firmware and applications. Nitro has enabled EC2 to support Intel AMD and Amazons custom silicon - the Graviton processor family - while raising the industry bar for security and performance across our product line. We integrate hardware firmware application software and services to deliver new virtualized and bare-metal compute platforms for companies from startups through the Fortune 500.

Join Nitro Instance Lifecycle (NIL) team within EC2 where you will develop critical services powering cloud infrastructure. As a skilled engineer with expertise in C youll work on software that provide essential services to customer instances and EC2 dataplane applications. This role offers unique opportunities to design and build high-performance reliable services that operate at massive scale to ensure customers are able to launch instances successfully while simultaneously protecting droplet resources from potential security threats.

This position requires an engineer who thrives in an embedded systems environment and can deliver robust solutions for the infrastructure that underpins AWS services. Youll help shape the future of cloud computing by creating efficient scalable and secure services that operate close to the hardware. Your contributions will directly impact customer experience and the performance of one of the worlds largest cloud platforms.


Key job responsibilities
- You will be responsible for designing developing testing and deploying large-scale software running across AWS data centers.
- You will collaborate closely with EC2 teams to help curate the teams roadmap. You will also drive the system architecture spearhead best practices that enable a quality product and help coach and develop junior engineers.
- A successful candidate will have an established background in engineering large scale software systems a strong technical ability great communication skills and a motivation to achieve results in a fast paced environment.
- Openness to leveraging AI tools and technologies to enhance productivity and technical problem-solving.


A day in the life
Your day begins with a quick team standup to align on priorities and discuss any operational issues that need attention. Youll spend time designing new components for our embedded services or enhancing existing ones writing efficient code in C or Rust and collaborating with teammates on technical reviews. You might debug complex issues affecting service performance optimize critical paths in the codebase or work on improving security mechanisms. Throughout the day youll coordinate with partner teams to ensure smooth integration between services and regularly validate that your solutions meet the high reliability standards required for AWS infrastructure.



About the team
We play critical role in managing EC2 instances that utilize the Nitro system. We handle a diverse set of responsibilities related to the lifecycle and hardware management of EC2 instances. The team owns key responsibilities that includes EC2 Instances life cycle management on the Nitro platform to manage instance creation execution and termination by coordinating with other on-instance components such as Hypervisor Networking and Storage services. Were passionate about solving challenging problems at the intersection of hardware and software creating high-performance services that operate at massive scale.

- 3 years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 2 years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- 1 years of software development engineer or related occupational experience
- 1 years of designing and developing large-scale multi-tiered multi-threaded embedded or distributed software applications tools systems and services using: C# C Java or Perl experience
- 1 years of Object Oriented Design experience
- Bachelors degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science Engineering Mathematics or a related field
- Experience programming with at least one software programming language

- 3 years of full software development life cycle including coding standards code reviews source control management build processes testing and operations experience
- Bachelors degree in computer science or equivalent

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 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 WA Seattle - 143700.00 - 194400.00 USD annually