Principal Engineer, AWS Athena and Glue ETL

Are you passionate about building the serverless infrastructure that powers analytics for hundreds of thousands of AWS customers? AWS Athena and Glue ETL is looking for a Principal Engineer to own components of the serverless platform — the multi-tenant compute layer that orchestrates how queries, jobs, and interactive sessions are launched, routed, executed and managed across AWS's analytics stack.

Our services process billions of queries per week, serving customers who rely on Amazon Athena for interactive SQL and Spark analytics, AWS Glue ETL for serverless data integration, and Zero-ETL for automated replication pipelines.

As a Principal Engineer, you will own significant components of the platform end-to-end and drive novel solutions and optimizations. You will define the technical vision, contribute to the most critical system components, and drive architectural convergence across AWS analytics services.

Key job responsibilities
- Own components of the platform end-to-end: compute orchestration, multi-provider routing, telemetry, etc.

- Drive compute latency optimization: architect and deliver sub-second startup including VPC connectivity across all workload types and compute options.

- Optimize compute utilization: design intelligent workload placement and pool sharing strategies that balance the fundamental tension between low latency and efficient resource utilization.

- Architect platform convergence: drive enhancements for Athena and Glue, replacing and enhancing tech stacks, and align across AWS analytics services over time.

- Drive operational excellence.

- Adoption new hardware platforms: deliver customer price/performance improvements across the compute fleet.

- Contribute to critical system components: design and implement solutions for the most complex and impactful areas of compute orchestration, latency optimization, and workload routing.

- Lead cross-team technical alignment: drive architectural consensus across multiple analytics service teams. Represent the team in senior technical reviews and forums.

- Mentor and develop engineers: establish engineering standards, lead design reviews, and help senior engineers grow in strategic thinking and organizational influence.

- Deliver engineering velocity improvements: drive development process transformation to accelerate the pace of innovation across the organization.


A day in the life
You start your morning reviewing platform metrics — operational, latency and utilization rates across interactive SQL queries, Spark sessions, and batch jobs. You identify opportunities for improvements.

Mid-morning, you lead a design review on platform telemetry improvements, defining what observability data is needed to improve operational excellence. A senior engineer proposes a new approach to compute provider routing — you ask probing questions, help them think through failure modes under load, and guide them toward a solution that balances latency guarantees with cost efficiency.

After lunch, you join an architecture discussion with a partner analytics team about their requirements for adopting a project. You then dive into the details of a latency regression in session startup times, working through the system to identify root cause and design a fix.

Later in the afternoon, you collaborate with peer Principal Engineers to align on an upcoming platform change that affects multiple services. You then spend time mentoring one of your senior engineers who is preparing a technical proposal for cross-account warm pool sharing — coaching them on how to frame the trade-offs, anticipate objections from security reviewers, and build consensus across teams.

Throughout the day, you balance deep technical work with broad organizational influence, serving as the technical owner of AWS's analytics services for hundreds of thousands of customers.

About the team
The AWS Athena and Glue ETL organization builds and operates core analytics and data processing infrastructure for AWS. We own Amazon Athena (serverless interactive query and analytics), AWS Glue ETL (serverless data integration with Apache Spark), Data Management and Quality, Drivers, Connectors, and Zero-ETL Integrations. Our services collectively process billions of queries per week for hundreds of thousands of active customers.

We are building the future of serverless analytics — converging our compute infrastructure onto a unified platform, shipping next-generation Spark-based analytics with modern pricing models, and competing directly with the industry's leading analytics platforms.

You will work alongside a strong Principal Engineer community with support and technical guidance from Senior Principal Engineers. The team hubs are in East Palo Alto and Bellevue, with additional engineering presence in New York.

We value builders who combine technical depth with customer obsession. Our team culture emphasizes ownership, operational excellence, and the belief that the best architectures emerge from engineers who understand the customer experience and think long-term about how systems evolve.

Basic Qualifications

- 15+ years of professional software development experience

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)

- Experience building and operating large-scale data analytics or compute platforms serving hundreds of thousands of customers

- Deep expertise in distributed systems design, including multi-tenant compute platforms, resource orchestration, scheduling, and latency optimization

- Experience providing technical leadership on high-impact, cross-functional initiatives and driving architectural alignment across multiple engineering organizations

- Track record of contributing to production systems while simultaneously driving organizational-level technical strategy

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience with platform telemetry, observability, capacity planning, and operational excellence at scale

- Deep knowledge of the Apache Spark ecosystem or similar distributed data processing frameworks, including execution lifecycle management and serverless deployment models

- Track record of driving large-scale technology migrations and platform modernization — replacing legacy systems while maintaining service continuity and improving developer velocity

- Experience optimizing compute utilization, cold-start latency, and price/performance in multi-tenant environments

- Experience building platforms consumed by multiple services with different performance requirements (interactive, batch, streaming)

- Familiarity with hardware architectures, VPC networking, or Linux kernel-level performance tuning

- Experience with SQL analytics engines (Trino, Presto, Spark SQL) or data lake technologies (Apache Iceberg, Hive Metastore)

- Publications, patents, or speaking at technical conferences (VLDB, SIGMOD, Data+AI Summit, Spark Summit)

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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.

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 https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

USA, CA, East Palo Alto - 230,100.00 - 311,200.00 USD annually
USA, NY, New York - 220,100.00 - 297,700.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Bellevue - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually