You will also play a critical role in growing the engineering team. With strong senior engineers who are deep technically but still developing their strategic thinking and organizational influence, you will mentor and coach the next generation of senior technical leaders. You will establish engineering standards, lead design reviews, and create the technical culture that enables the team to operate at the highest level.
Key job responsibilities
Define and drive the long-term technical strategy for the Lambda execution environment, ensuring alignment with the broader Lambda and AWS Compute vision.
Architect and build systems for execution environment management, cold start optimization, and resource scheduling at massive scale.
Write production code in Rust and C, contributing directly to the most complex and critical components of the execution environment.
Lead the design and evolution of microVM orchestration, working closely with the Firecracker virtualization stack and Linux kernel interfaces.
Drive cross-team technical alignment with other Lambda teams, and adjacent AWS Serverless, Container and Compute teams.
Mentor and develop senior engineers, helping them grow in strategic thinking, influence, and organization-level impact.
Establish and raise the engineering bar through design reviews, technical standards, and operational excellence practices.
Represent the Lambda Experience team in senior technical forums across AWS, influencing the direction of serverless compute infrastructure.
A day in the life
You may start your morning reviewing operational metrics for the Lambda Execution Environment, looking at invocation latency percentiles, cold start performance, and resource utilization trends across AWS Regions. You may join a design review where a senior engineer is proposing a new approach to execution environment caching — you will ask probing questions, help them think through edge cases, and guide them toward a solution that balances performance with security isolation.
Mid-morning, you may dive into code, perhaps working on a Rust component that optimizes how execution environments are pre-warmed, or investigating a subtle performance regression in the microVM boot path. After lunch, you may collaborate with the Data Plane team in Seattle that routes Lambda invocations to execution environments, aligning on an upcoming change that affects invocation routing and ensuring the execution environment architecture can accommodate new traffic patterns gracefully.
You may then meet with Lambda Product Managers to discuss the customer experience, providing technical perspective on upcoming features and ensuring that the execution environment roadmap reflects customer needs and feedback. Later in the afternoon, you may spend time with your manager discussing the three-year technical roadmap and how the team's investments in next-generation scheduling will support Lambda's growth trajectory.
You may end the day mentoring one of your senior engineers, helping them prepare a technical proposal that will require them to influence a partner team — coaching them on how to frame the problem, anticipate objections, and build consensus. Throughout the day, you will balance deep technical work with broad organizational influence, serving as the technical anchor for a team that is building one of the most critical execution paths in all of AWS.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience
Experience with virtualization (Hypervisors, VMware, Xen), or experience in software development
Experience providing technical leadership on high-impact cross-fucntional technical project
12+ years of professional software development experience, with significant depth in systems programming.
Deep knowledge of Linux kernel internals, including process scheduling, memory management, and namespaces/cgroups.
Experience with designing and building applications using container and serverless technologies
Experience in written and verbal communication with the ability to present complex technical information in a clear and concise manner to executives and non-technical leaders
Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
Experience with systems-level programming languages such as Rust and/or C/C++.
Experience optimizing cold start latency, resource scheduling, or execution environment lifecycle management in multi-tenant systems.
Experience designing and building large-scale, low-latency, highly available distributed systems.
Amazon is an equal opportunities employer. We believe passionately that employing a diverse workforce is central to our success. We make recruiting decisions based on your experience and skills. We value your passion to discover, invent, simplify and build. Protecting your privacy and the security of your data is a longstanding top priority for Amazon. Please consult our Privacy Notice (https://www.amazon.jobs/en/privacy_page) to know more about how we collect, use and transfer the personal data of our candidates.
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.
