What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Software Developer, AWS WorkSpaces position at Amazon?
Description
As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, we have a vision to provide business applications, leveraging Amazon’s unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers’ businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon’s real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use.
Amazon WorkSpaces has protected and empowered enterprise work for over a decade, and we are now reimagining what a workspace is. We are building Agentic WorkSpaces: a platform where the workspace itself is an active partner in how you work, not just infrastructure that delivers applications. Today more than a million users rely on WorkSpaces daily; tomorrow those workspaces will host AI agents alongside humans, agents that code, troubleshoot, analyze, and act on behalf of their users, governed by the same identity and security policies as the people they serve. We compete with Microsoft, Citrix, and Omnissa, and we intend to leapfrog them by building the workspace that was designed for the agentic era, not retrofitted for it.
Agentic Workspaces' On-Instance Software (OIS) is the layer that makes this possible from the inside of every WorkSpace: the operating system, provisioning logic, on-instance agents, telemetry, and update mechanisms across Windows and Linux. Our vision is for that software to be invisible, operating systems that launch within weeks of upstream general availability, agents that update themselves safely without disrupting access, provisioning that is self-diagnosable, and fleet management that works through the same AWS tools customers already use, delivered from commercial regions to classified partitions with automation as the default so quality and breadth improve release over release.
We are looking for a Software Development Engineer to design, build, and operate the services and agents that provision, secure, and maintain WorkSpaces for humans and, increasingly, for the AI agents that work beside them, across every supported OS and identity provider. You will own end-to-end delivery of features and systems within OIS - from design through deployment and operations - holding a high bar for availability, latency, and security.
You are customer-obsessed, technically deep, and energized by solving hard problems. You think big about what the workspace of the future looks like - a unified agent shipping to two platforms from one codebase, an identity model that treats humans and agents as first-class citizens, and autonomous troubleshooting that resolves issues before users notice - and then you build the systems to get there. You thrive in ambiguity, make sound trade-off decisions with incomplete information, and hold yourself accountable for results that matter. You want to solve challenging problems in operating systems, identity, AI, and desktop platform engineering at a scale that impacts more than a million users daily.
Key job responsibilities
Design and deliver features and systems within On-Instance Software, contributing to the architecture strategy for how the on-instance layer evolves to host and govern AI agents alongside human users.
Drive the agent unification work that lets Windows and Linux features ship from a single codebase, making feature parity the default rather than a follow-up. Partner with EC2, identity providers, self-service troubleshooting, and platform teams - earning trust by driving technical discussions that result in impactful architectural decisions.
Design and implement on-instance identity, security, and governance for a world where humans and agents share the same desktop: identity integration across the major join models, a trust and authorization posture that treats agents as first-class principals, and compliance-ready images built in rather than bolted on.
Own the operation of low-latency, high-availability provisioning and agent services used by more than one million WorkSpaces users globally. Ensure your services meet stringent SLAs across multiple production regions, AWS partitions, and OS variants, with self-service diagnostics and autonomous issue resolution before customers are impacted.
Drive engineering excellence through instrumentation, automated testing, and pipeline-based deployment - eliminating manual toil and shipping features simultaneously across Windows and Linux. Think big about the agentic era and experiment boldly with AI-powered capabilities such as conversational setup, natural-language troubleshooting, and AI-assisted fleet management.
Raise the bar on customer self-service so operating-system breadth, safe automatic updates, and reliable provisioning are delivered without imposing an operational tax on the customer or the agent workflows running on the desktop.
About the team
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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
- 8 years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Master's degree in computer science or equivalent
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