Principal Software Engineer, AWS Distributed SQL

AWS Databases is hiring Principal/Sr Principal Engineers to lead query processing for two of its key database engines. Amazon Redshift is a petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse used by tens of thousands of customers. Amazon Aurora DSQL is a serverless, distributed SQL database built for active-active availability and virtually unlimited scale. Both engines depend on the same discipline: turning SQL into well-optimized plans and running them fast at massive scale. Depending on your depth and interests, you'll join one of three teams: Redshift Query Optimization, the Redshift Execution Engine, or Aurora DSQL Query Processing.

Key job responsibilities

• Set and execute a multi-year technical strategy for query optimization and execution that improves price-performance against Databricks, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and other cloud databases.
• Own core query processing architecture, including parsing and semantic analysis, query rewriting, cost-based planning, statistics and cardinality estimation, plan caching, and physical execution.
• Build high-performance execution engines (vectorized and pipelined operators, memory management, code generation, massively parallel and distributed execution) that serve analytical and transactional workloads.
• Advance optimization over open table formats and heterogeneous storage, such as Iceberg and Parquet data lakes and federated sources. Build adaptive execution that corrects plans at runtime.
• Turn ambiguous customer and business requirements into concrete projects, and personally own design, code, deployment, and operations from end to end.
• Partner across AWS Databases on product vision and integration with the broader database portfolio. Work directly with customers on adoption and roadmap.
• Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, coding standards, and operational excellence. Mentor senior engineers, and help hire and grow a strong team.
• 10+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• 10+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability, and scaling) of new and existing systems
• Deep experience in database internals or query processing (query optimization, execution engines, or both) and in distributed systems
• Proficiency in C++, Rust, Java, or a similar systems language, building and operating mission-critical, highly available systems
• Experience as a technical leader driving strategy and complex, high-impact projects across organizational boundaries
• Experience mentoring engineers or leading engineering teams