Software Development Engineer, Amazon Optics

Come and build innovative services that secure the foundation of our cloud from security threats using computer vision and applied machine learning that will make a lasting impact on society

The Amazon Optics team builds and manages services that are used by AWS employees to secure our physical sites. Our services allow our customers to protect AWS locations and preserves the trust that all AWS users have in us. You’ll work with other software development engineers every day that are as passionate as you are about building systems that are an essential tool for our customers in keeping AWS sites secure! The services you build are used around the world to secure assets for every single AWS customer!

Our team provides solutions where “can’t be done” isn’t considered an answer, taking on the impossible and finding creative solutions. You will stretch yourself and grow. You will share your knowledge with others and help others achieve. You’ll be empowered to automate away operational efficiencies for both the team and our customers. You will be challenged to solve complex architecture problems with solutions that are extensible and scale, yet always look for ways to further simplify your solutions. You will work with the team on multiple products that are deployed to every AWS region using AWS services in a fully IaC deployment environment where you own everything end to end - design, development, testing, deploying.

You will join a team that values strong intuition, but seek metrics and other data sources to back up their assumptions.

This job can be located in Herndon, VA or Baltimore, MD

Key job responsibilities As a Software Development Engineer II, you will own and deliver software features end-to-end across the full development lifecycle—scoping, design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance. You will solve difficult technical problems by identifying simple, scalable designs and leveraging a broad range of implementation approaches. You'll work independently to design solutions for new features and improvements, making effective priority tradeoffs between feature development and operational excellence. You will actively participate in code reviews, providing meaningful feedback to engineers at all levels, and ensure operational issues are permanently resolved at their root cause. Additionally, you'll mentor teammates, train new engineers on team architecture, and collaborate with customers and stakeholders to understand business value. You are expected to keep your skills current and identify opportunities to improve team software and processes.

A day in the life On any given day, you might start by reviewing pull requests from teammates—providing constructive, meaningful feedback—before diving into designing or coding a feature you own end-to-end. You'll collaborate with stakeholders to clarify requirements, make tradeoff decisions between new development and operational improvements, and troubleshoot production issues to identify root causes. You may also spend time mentoring a junior engineer, documenting your system's architecture for the team, or driving a discussion to resolve a technical disagreement with peers. No two days look the same, but autonomy, ownership, and impact are constants.