Define the edge-to-cloud contract: how telemetry, metrics, and commands flow between devices and AWS services, with the right delivery guarantees, quality-of-service, and failure semantics for each class of data.
Solve the defining hard problems: of a system where correctness means both the right result and the right timing, bounded latency, determinism, resource constraints on embedded hardware, and graceful degradation when connectivity is lost.
Multiply the team: establish engineering standards, mentor SDE I/IIs and raise the bar in hiring, reviews, and design, and align hardware, controls, security, and operations partners around a shared technical vision.
If you're excited by low-level systems, real-time data and connecting physical equipment to the cloud at scale and by being the technical leader who makes it happen this is the role for you.
Key job responsibilities
As an SDE III on this team, you are a technical leader accountable for the architecture and long-term health of the controls and middleware platform, not just individual components. You will operate across multiple workstreams and teams, make the consequential design decisions, and remain deeply hands-on where it matters most.
Your primary responsibilities will include
Architecting the platform, not just components: owning the end-to-end design of the controls and real-time middleware across embedded/edge controllers and the cloud, making the durable decisions on type systems, serialization, memory layout, schema evolution, and communication patterns that everything else depends on.
Driving multi-year technical strategy: defining the roadmap for the next iteration of "What comes next", industrial protocol support, and cloud integration, sequencing the work, and making explicit build-vs-buy and short-term-vs-durable tradeoffs with the data to back them.
Owning real-time correctness at system scale: reasoning about latency budgets, throughput, determinism, and failure modes across a distributed system adjacent to physical control loops, and setting the standards that keep those guarantees intact as the system grows.
Leading cross-team and cross-discipline efforts: turning ambiguous, org-level requirements into clear technical direction, and aligning hardware, controls, security, and operations partners (and other software teams) around shared interfaces and contracts.
Raising the engineering bar broadly: establishing standards for testing (unit, integration, and on-hardware validation), performance benchmarking, operational excellence, and code quality, and holding the team to them through design and code review.
Growing engineers: mentoring Junior and Mid level SDE, developing their technical judgment, and contributing as a strong interviewer and bar raiser in hiring.
De-risking the hardest problems: personally diving into the highest-ambiguity, highest-impact technical challenges (new protocol integrations, performance-critical paths, cross-language data exchange) and bringing them to a proven, maintainable end state.
The ideal candidate is a senior software engineer with a track record of owning the architecture of complex software systems and delivering them to production. You have depth across several of: real-time or embedded systems, industrial automation platforms and hardware protocols, distributed systems, middleware/messaging (pub/sub, RPC), and cloud communication and the breadth to reason about how all of these fit together into a coherent platform. You are comfortable working close to the metal (memory, concurrency, serialization, timing) and setting direction at the system and organizational level. You influence beyond your own team, make sound decisions under ambiguity and hardware/timing constraints, and lift the engineers around you. Experience with Rust, C/C++, or Python, and with technologies such as industrial automation platforms, OPC-UA, DDS/Zenoh or similar real-time middleware, is a strong advantage.
A day in the life
AWS Infrastructure Services (AIS) 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.
About the team
The Data Center Builder Tools team develops tooling for device frameworks, and device lifecycle management in AWS Data Centers. This includes both frontend and backend services use by internal development teams and on-site customers. Our tools power the industrial controls systems deployed in our data centers.
Experience in professional, non-internship software development
Experience contributing to the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems
Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
Experience in embedded development in C/C++
Experience programming with at least one modern language such as Python, Ruby, Golang, Java, C++, C#, Rust
Proficiency in embedded development in Rust; alternatively, strong modern C/C++ embedded experience with demonstrated willingness and ability to work in Rust
Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
Experience with full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
Experience writing low level drivers
Experience with Industrial Protocols (Ethernet/IP, EtherCAT, Profinet and OPC-UA).
Experience with middleware (ROS2, Zenoh)
Experience with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Flatbufers, or similar RPC/serialization frameworks
Experience with simulation / visualization tools (Omniverse, Foxglove).
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