Software Engineer II, Athena Engine Front End

Every day, customers run millions of queries on Amazon Athena, from ad-hoc exploration to mission-critical pipelines. Athena is now building its next-generation engine across multiple engines (e.g. Spark, DuckDB) and the Engine Front End team is responsible for the query lifecycle management and routing queries to the right engine with the optimal configuration.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that simplifies data analysis in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to set up or manage. Our customers use Athena to process logs, perform data analytics, and run interactive queries and get started quickly. This is all done through a simple, easy to use API in front of a complex, distributed system.

Key job responsibilities
Our ideal candidate has strong programming skills and sound judgment about distributed systems that customers depend on every day. As an SDE II on the team you will own features and services end to end: shape designs with input from senior engineers and your manager, build, test, ship through our release pipelines, and operate what you ship in production. The problems are concrete and hard. Route millions of queries a day across engine generations without customers noticing. Prove a new engine build is safe before it takes production traffic. Keep the submission path fast and reliable while the engine underneath it changes. Everything you ship is exercised by every query Athena runs, so we care about engineers who sweat correctness, deployment safety, and failures that make sense to customers. We expect you to learn the system deeply, raise problems we have not spotted yet, and grow toward driving designs independently.