Sr. Software Development Engineer - Persistence, DynamoDB Storage Engine

Description

Come help us shape the future of one of the largest NoSQL database services on the planet!

Amazon DynamoDB is one of the largest distributed database systems in the market, delivering single-digit-millisecond performance at any scale. At DynamoDB, we continue to believe it is Day 1! The DynamoDB Storage Engine team is the custodian of all customer retrievable data stored on disk in DynamoDB and owns services, components and libraries that persist customer data on disk, keep it secure and make it available for timely retrieval.

We are looking for a senior software development engineer with a deep passion for storage and persistence — someone who thinks deeply about how data should live on disk, how to balance durability guarantees against performance, and who finds elegance in the engineering of reliable, space-efficient, crash-resilient storage systems.

Many of the world's fastest growing businesses, such as Lyft, Airbnb, and Redfin, as well as enterprises, such as Samsung, Toyota, and Capital One, depend on the scale and performance of DynamoDB to support their mission-critical workloads. In this role, your work will directly safeguard the durability and availability of data for these customers at planetary scale.

What You'll Do

- As a senior engineer on the persistence track, you will own the on-disk storage layer of the DynamoDB storage engine — the foundation upon which all customer data durability rests.
- Design and implement optimal on-disk representations for various in-memory data structures, balancing read performance, write amplification, and space efficiency.
- Architect and evolve storage formats, compression strategies, and encoding schemes that minimize footprint while preserving fast retrieval.
- Build and maintain mechanisms for crash recovery, data integrity verification, and resilience to partial failure — ensuring customer data is never lost or corrupted.
- Own the write-ahead log, compaction pipelines, and data lifecycle management from ingestion through tiered storage.
- Drive the long-term storage architecture strategy, evaluating tradeoffs across durability, availability, latency, and cost.
- Mentor engineers across the team on storage internals, failure mode reasoning, and persistence best practices.

What We're Looking For
- Deep technical expertise in C and/or Rust with significant experience writing systems code that interacts directly with storage media.
- Strong understanding of storage engine fundamentals: on-disk data formats, write-ahead logging, checkpointing, and crash recovery.
- Experience designing for resilience to failure — reasoning about partial writes, torn pages, bit rot, and data corruption at every layer.
- Expertise in compression algorithms and encoding schemes — understanding when and how to apply them for optimal size/speed tradeoffs.
- Solid understanding of how file systems, block devices, and I/O subsystems behave under real-world workloads.
- Track record of shipping durable, production storage systems where data loss is unacceptable.
What Would Set You Apart

- Prior experience building or operating high-throughput distributed storage services or database engines at scale.
- Hands-on experience with LSM tree-based storage engines — compaction strategies, write amplification tradeoffs, bloom filters, level/tiered architectures, space amplification management.
- Deep familiarity with compression internals (LZ4, Zstandard, dictionary compression, per-block vs. per-page strategies) and their interaction with read/write patterns.
- Experience with storage device characteristics — understanding SSD FTL behavior, write cliffs, GC-induced latency, device wear, and how to design software that works with (not against) the hardware.
- Familiarity with Linux I/O subsystems including io_uring, AIO, direct I/O, and fallocate for predictable storage behavior.
- Experience with formal or semi-formal techniques for verifying correctness of persistence logic (crash consistency proofs, fault injection testing, Jepsen-style validation).
- Contributions to open-source storage engines or database projects.




About the team
AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.  

Why AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses.  

Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon  conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness.  

Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.  

Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud.

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

- 5 years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.