Principal Engineer | Multiple Locations, USA, Global Specialty Recruiting Team

At Amazon, Principal Engineers are both organizational leaders and hands-on builders. As Amazon’s most senior individual contributors, Principal Engineers work on our hardest problems, help establish technical standards and drive the overall technical architecture, engineering practices, and engineering methodologies for products that delight our customers. While many companies this size take their foot-off the gas pedal, at Amazon, it’s still Day 1. This startup mentality, does not admit the luxury of a conservative approach.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is one of the foundational services of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a cornerstone of modern cloud computing. Since launching in 2006, EC2 has provided secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud — giving customers virtual servers ("instances") with complete control over their computing resources and the broadest choice of processor, storage, networking, and operating system configurations.

Today, EC2 operates at extraordinary scale, serving millions of customers worldwide — from individual developers to the largest enterprises and public-sector organizations. It offers thousands of instance types optimized for virtually every workload, spanning general-purpose, compute-, memory-, storage-, and accelerator-optimized use cases across multiple CPU architectures (including AWS's own Graviton processors) and GPU-powered instances for large-scale AI and machine learning.

What the EC2 Organization Builds
Engineers in the EC2 organization work on some of the most technically challenging and high-impact systems in the industry, including:

Compute & virtualization — the virtual server platform that powers a vast portion of the internet, including the AWS Nitro System, AWS's custom hardware and lightweight hypervisor technology that delivers performance, security, and isolation at hyperscale.
Networking — high-performance networking infrastructure and services that move enormous volumes of traffic securely, reliably, and efficiently across the AWS cloud.
Custom silicon & hardware — purpose-built chips and hardware (such as Graviton and Nitro cards) that advance performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
AI & accelerated computing — next-generation instances engineered for training and serving large-scale AI models, with cutting-edge networking and GPU/accelerator capabilities.
Scalability, availability & operational excellence — the systems and tooling that keep these services fault-tolerant, highly available, and continuously improving at global scale.

If you have a background in developing large-scale distributed systems, or are a specialist in any of the following areas, we would love to review your application: compute virtualization, server provisioning and fleet management, high-performance data plane engineering, control plane and orchestration systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure at scale.

Key job responsibilities
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will:

Serve as a technical leader on our most demanding, cross-functional projects.
Functionally decompose complex problems into simple, straight-forward solutions.
Fully and completely understand system inter-dependencies and limitations.
Possess expert knowledge in performance, scalability, enterprise system architecture, and engineering best practices.
Assist in the career development of others, actively mentoring individuals and the community on advanced technical issues and helping managers guide the career growth of their team members
Exert technical influence over multiple teams, increasing their productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience. You are a leader, builder and an operator.
Balance technical leadership and savvy with strong business judgment to make the right decisions about technology choices.

About the team
EC2 is foundational infrastructure that a significant share of the digital world depends on. The organization combines the pace and ownership of a startup with the scale and reach of AWS, giving engineers the rare opportunity to make decisions that impact customers globally. It's an environment built for people who want to solve hard, ambiguous problems in distributed systems, virtualization, networking, security, performance, and AI infrastructure — and to see their work operate at a scale few other places can offer.