Principal Software Engineer, AWS Distributed SQL
Posted November 11, 2026
Job Description
- AWS Databases is hiring Principal/Sr Principal Engineers to lead query processing for two of its key database engines. Amazon Redshift is a petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse used by tens of thousands
Description
- AWS Databases is hiring Principal/Sr Principal Engineers to lead query processing for two of its key database engines. Amazon Redshift is a petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse used by tens of thousands of customers. Amazon Aurora DSQL is a serverless, distributed SQL database built for active-active availability and virtually unlimited scale. Both engines depend on the same discipline: turning SQL into well-optimized plans and running them fast at massive scale. Depending on your depth and interests, you'll join one of three teams: Redshift Query Optimization, the Redshift Execution Engine, or Aurora DSQL Query Processing. Key job responsibilities - Set and execute a multi-year technical strategy for query optimization and execution that improves price-performance against Databricks, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and other cloud databases. - Own core query processing architecture, including parsing and semantic analysis, query rewriting, cost-based planning, statistics and cardinality estimation, plan caching, and physical execution. - Build high-performance execution engines (vectorized and pipelined operators, memory management, code generation, massively parallel and distributed execution) that serve analytical and transactional workloads. - Advance optimization over open table formats and heterogeneous storage, such as Iceberg and Parquet data lakes and federated sources. Build adaptive execution that corrects plans at runtime. - Turn ambiguous customer and business requirements into concrete projects, and personally own design, code, deployment, and operations from end to end. - Partner across AWS Databases on product vision and integration with the broader database portfolio. Work directly with customers on adoption and roadmap. - Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, coding standards, and operational excellence. Mentor senior engineers, and help hire and grow a strong team.
Basic Qualifications
- - 10+ years of non-internship professional software development experience - 10+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability, and scaling) of new and existing systems - Deep experience in database internals or query processing (query optimization, execution engines, or both) and in distributed systems - Proficiency in C++, Rust, Java, or a similar systems language, building and operating mission-critical, highly available systems - Experience as a technical leader driving strategy and complex, high-impact projects across organizational boundaries - Experience mentoring engineers or leading engineering teams