Sr. System Development Engineer, Hardware Engineering

AWS Infrastructure Services owns the design, planning, delivery, and operation of all AWS global infrastructure. In other words, we’re the people who keep the cloud running. We support all AWS data centers and all of the servers, storage, networking, power, and cooling equipment that ensure our customers have continual access to the innovation they rely on. We work on the most challenging problems, with thousands of variables impacting the supply chain — and we’re looking for talented people who want to help.

You’ll join a diverse team of software, hardware, and network engineers, supply chain specialists, security experts, operations managers, and other vital roles. You’ll collaborate with people across AWS to help us deliver the highest standards for safety and security while providing seemingly infinite capacity at the lowest possible cost for our customers. And you’ll experience an inclusive culture that welcomes bold ideas and empowers you to own them to completion.


The AWS Hardware Engineering team creates server designs for Amazon’s innovative web services. Our designs are industry-leading in frugality and operational excellence, and are critical to the success of the AWS business and the more than one million customers who use AWS today. Our engineers solve challenging technology problems, and build architecturally sound, high-quality components to enable AWS to realize critical business strategies.

The ideal candidate for this role will have a proven track record of rapidly coming up to speed on new engineering disciplines, making impactful decisions within that space, and have experience gluing together components written by more specialized engineers to create a cohesive, well-running engineering product. AWS Engineers are shaping the way people use computers and designing the future of cloud computing technology – come help us make history!

What you will do: You will be a member of the HWEng Storage Drives team and will interact with engineers across the company to lead and develop automation and infrastructure capabilities to improve OEM drive operational health, qualification and integration across all of AWS storage server platforms. Key Responsibilities for this position include authoring requirements specifications, system design, and development, all while testing at each phase. There are two main areas of focus for this position: software test development and integration to enable storage hardware, and system debugging for production hosts.

Why it matters: Public cloud IT services represent the majority of growth in the overall IT services market and will continue to do so for several years to come. The scale of AWS, combined with an understanding of how our hardware is used, creates a unique opportunity for component customization that will directly benefit customers.

Why you will love it: You will work with engineers across the company to build next-generation storage servers. You will have a direct impact on our bottom line and the ability to deliver improvements for our developers. You will be part of a growing, fast paced, and fun team. You will have ownership for the implementation of your work. You will see direct product improvements based on the results of your work.

Key job responsibilities
- Must have leadership experience developing automation software, spanning across multiple teams and multiple organizations.
- Must have experience designing and building system-level software at scale, with an emphasis on durability, availability, security, and diagnostics.
- Must have a strong understanding of OS internals, most notably storage subsystems in a Linux-based environment.
- Must have demonstrated experience with building and troubleshooting device drivers for Linux on ARM and x86.
- Must have demonstrated experience debugging Linux boot and runtime problems on ARM and x86.
- Must have demonstrated experience developing tools to perform testing running on Linux-based systems
- Must have experience hands on development of automation software in at least one modern language, such as Python, Ruby, Java, or others.
- Desirable to have an understanding of AWS services, specifically, distributed storage systems and use of storage hardware
- Desirable to have an understanding of drive (HDD, SSD) technology

A day in the life
Lead the Hardware Engineering (HWEng) System Development (SysDE) effort to define and build software and enabling tools, according to defined HWEng Software development best practices; Track and report progress. Work across internal HWEng teams, to ensure drive chosen for new storage hardware delivers performance, reliability and operational health needed by the EC2, EBS, and S3 platforms. Work closely with internal customers to identify early any potential problems with on-boarding new storage servers into their ecosystem. Build, manage, and deploy pipelines for rapid deployment of new code changes to a variety of org-owned and customer-owned systems. Build monitoring tools and metrics to ensure hardware is running properly in both test and production environments.

About the team
System Development Engineers in AWS Hardware Engineering wear many hats. From orchestration tooling development, to hardware integration, to kernel driver debugging, we dive deep into problems across the breadth of AWS. The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of rapidly coming up to speed on new engineering disciplines, making impactful decisions within that space, and have experience gluing together components written by more specialized engineers to create a cohesive, well-running engineering product.

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.

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.

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.

Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness.

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.