Senior Software Development Engineer, AWS Elastic MapReduce (EMR)

Do you enjoy working on large-scale distributed systems? Do you want to influence how the world interacts with and analyzes large data sets across a number of industries and use cases?

Amazon EMR provides a managed framework that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to process vast amounts of data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances using popular distributed frameworks such as Apache Spark, HBase, Presto, and Flink, and interact with data in other AWS data stores such as Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB. Our customers across industries — real estate, travel, finance, gaming, and more — use EMR to process and interact with their vast datasets to fulfill existing and uncover new business needs.

We are looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer to help us drive the technical direction of EMR and deliver innovative features that enable an interactive, secure, and seamless experience for our growing customer base. A key focus is our next-generation cluster management system, designed with an emphasis on speed, reliability, and security. You will own the design and implementation of critical high-performance, large-scale services and libraries, driving solutions to complex business problems with a high degree of autonomy. You will set the technical bar for the team — defining SDLC best practices, shaping architectural decisions, and influencing the long-term technical roadmap.

In this role, you will collaborate with and mentor engineers across the team, partnering with senior and principal engineers who are domain experts at AWS. You will operate in a fast-paced environment working on complex problems for a successful and long-running product, with a focus on delivering high-quality software that directly impacts how customers run large-scale data workloads.

Our ideal candidate has deep expertise in distributed systems, strong engineering judgment, and a track record of delivering impactful technical work with broad organizational influence.

For more information:

AWS EMR: https://aws.amazon.com/emr/
AWS Big Data Blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/


Key job responsibilities
- Own the design and development of large-scale distributed services that power Amazon EMR's cluster management platform, serving thousands of customers worldwide.
- Drive architectural decisions and technical roadmap for core control plane components, balancing speed, reliability, and security.
- Collaborate with product, science, and engineering teams to deliver new EMR capabilities end-to-end, from design through production.
- Set the engineering bar for the team — establishing coding standards, leading design reviews, and ensuring operational excellence across services.
- Mentor and grow engineers at multiple levels, fostering a culture of technical rigor and continuous improvement.
- Identify and resolve complex distributed systems challenges at scale, proactively improving reliability, performance, and customer experience.


A day in the life
Most of your time goes into designing and building the systems that keep EMR clusters running reliably at scale — think design docs, code reviews, and working through hard distributed systems problems with your teammates. You'll regularly sync with partner teams across AWS to align on shared infrastructure and APIs. When customers hit issues at scale, you're part of figuring out why and making sure it doesn't happen again. Beyond the core work, you'll occasionally step into broader conversations about where the product is headed and help shape what the team builds next.

We build the core control plane that powers Amazon EMR — the service that lets companies across finance, healthcare, and gaming run large-scale data processing without managing infrastructure themselves. Our systems orchestrate every cluster from launch to termination at massive scale. We're a collaborative team with a mix of experience levels who value technical depth, direct feedback, and shipping things that matter. If you enjoy owning complex backend systems end-to-end and solving hard reliability and scalability problems with real customer impact, you'll fit right in.

About the team
AWS 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.

Why AWS? 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.

Inclusive Team Culture 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 conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness.

Mentorship & Career Growth 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.

Work/Life Balance 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.

Basic Qualifications

- 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team

Preferred Qualifications

- 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

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.