Senior Software Development Engineer, EC2 Hyperplane

Are you a seasoned engineer who wants to shape the technical direction of a team from the ground up? The Hyperplane team within AWS is rebuilding one of its critical engineering groups and looking for experienced technical leaders to help strengthen engineering practices, raise the bar on software quality, and drive the next wave of innovation — including investments in generative AI and a greenfield rewrite of a core system.

Hyperplane delivers a distributed Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platform that powers customer-facing services such as NAT Gateway, Elastic File System, Load Balancers, and AWS service endpoints. We operate at massive scale on critical workloads, and we need engineers who are comfortable navigating ambiguity, making sound technical trade-offs, and mentoring others along the way. If you want to leave a lasting mark on cloud networking infrastructure that serves millions of customers, this is the role for you.

Key job responsibilities

• Design and build highly scalable distributed systems for AWS's network virtualization infrastructure, ensuring low-latency and high-throughput performance for millions of customer workloads
• Lead technical design and architecture decisions for critical Hyperplane components, balancing short-term delivery needs with long-term extensibility and system health
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and hands-on guidance, helping to reset and strengthen the team's engineering culture and maturity
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams — including network engineering, security, and product management — to define requirements and deliver customer-facing improvements
• Drive the greenfield rewrite of a core system, applying modern approaches including generative AI to improve reliability, performance, and developer productivity

A day in the life

You might start your morning reviewing a design proposal for the new greenfield system, providing feedback that shapes the architecture before code is written. After a stand-up with your team, you spend focused time writing or reviewing code for a distributed state-tracking component. In the afternoon, you pair with a teammate to debug a tricky concurrency issue, then join a cross-team sync to align on an upcoming integration. Throughout the day, you balance hands-on technical work with coaching conversations that help the team grow.

About the team

The Hyperplane team builds and operates the foundational network virtualization platform that powers Amazon EC2. Our systems process trillions of packets daily, providing secure network isolation, policy enforcement, and traffic management for millions of customer instances across AWS regions. We are in a period of deliberate investment — rebuilding our team with experienced technical leaders, expanding into generative AI, and planning a greenfield rewrite of a critical system. It is a rare opportunity to join at a moment when you can directly influence the team's culture, technical direction, and long-term roadmap.

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.

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, WA, Seattle - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually