Sr. Software Development Engineer, AWS DMS

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) has migrated more than 1.5 million database workloads to AWS, helping enterprises move from commercial databases (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2) to open-source Amazon Aurora and RDS (PostgreSQL, MySQL). The service is used by customers across the world to migrate their most important data from their on-premises datacenters to Amazon services. Our customers depend on our services' reliability and security to handle their business data. More information on AWS DMS is available at http://aws.amazon.com/dms.

As a Senior SDE on the DMS team, you will be a technical leader driving the architecture, quality, and delivery of database migration services used by tens of thousands of customers worldwide. You'll work across two tracks: stabilizing and improving the existing DMS replication engine (a large-scale C/C++ system) and contributing to the design and delivery of our next-generation migration service.

This role demands someone who can operate at multiple altitudes - diving deep into core dumps and memory corruption one day, then leading a design review for a new migration architecture the next. You'll set technical direction for your area, mentor engineers across experience levels, influence the team's AI-powered engineering practices, and make trade-off decisions that balance security compliance, customer delivery, and long-term product health. You'll own outcomes end-to-end: from design through deployment to production operations at scale.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) is a part of AWS Utility Computing (UC) which provides product innovations — from foundational services such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), to consistently released new product innovations that continue to set AWS’s services and features apart in the industry. As a member of the UC organization, you’ll support the development and management of Compute, Database, Storage, Internet of Things (Iot), Platform, and Productivity Apps services in AWS, including support for customers who require specialized security solutions for their cloud services.

Key job responsibilities
Lead the design and implementation of complex features and improvements in the DMS replication engine, spanning C/C++ (current engine) and Java (next-generation service).
Drive technical strategy for one or more database endpoint areas (PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL), making architecture decisions that improve reliability, performance, and security for the entire customer fleet.
Own and reduce systemic quality issues - task crashes, memory corruption, data validation failures - through root cause analysis, systematic fixes, and improved testing infrastructure.
Design and deliver security remediations within SLA, including vulnerability fixes, credential exposure prevention, and secure dependency management.
Lead the design and expansion of automated test coverage, including combinatorial testing that exercises millions of parameter combinations across heterogeneous migration paths.
Mentor SDE1s and SDE2s through code reviews, design guidance, and pairing on complex debugging. Raise the technical bar across the team.
Drive adoption of AI-powered engineering practices - autonomous bug detection, AI-assisted debugging, automated test generation - to multiply team effectiveness with constrained headcount.
Collaborate with Principal Engineers on long-term architecture decisions, deprecation strategy, and migration service evolution.
Participate in on-call rotation and lead incident response for complex production issues affecting customer migrations.
Influence release quality and cadence - contributing to a predictable deployment cycle serving a large production fleet.

A day in the life
You might start the morning leading a design review for a new CDC checkpointing mechanism that eliminates a class of data loss scenarios during failover. After the review, you dive into a crash signature that's been affecting thousands of customer tasks - tracing it through Address Sanitizer output to a race condition in thread shutdown, writing the fix, and authoring an STP test that reproduces it under concurrent load. In the afternoon, you're mentoring a junior engineer through their first Oracle endpoint fix, helping them navigate the codebase and understand the replication protocol. You end the day reviewing the architecture proposal for integrating a debugger into production instances, providing feedback on the consent model and performance impact.

About the team
Our team is dedicated to supporting new members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and tenures, and we're building an environment that celebrates knowledge-sharing and mentorship. Our senior members enjoy one-on-one mentoring and thorough, but kind, code reviews. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects that help our team members develop your engineering expertise so you feel empowered to take on more complex tasks in the future.

The DMS engine team operates across Dublin, Poland, and the US. We're a team that takes ownership of a complex system and makes it better every release -reducing crashes, closing security gaps, and making migrations reliable enough that customers don't need our help to succeed. We leverage AI extensively: from autonomous bug-fixing to an on-call agent that cuts troubleshooting time dramatically.

Diverse Experiences
AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the 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:

AWS values curiosity and connection. Our employee-led and company-sponsored affinity groups promote inclusion and empower our people to take pride in what makes us unique. Our inclusion events foster stronger, more collaborative teams. Our continual innovation is fueled by the bold ideas, fresh perspectives, and passionate voices our teams bring to everything we do.

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 flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.

Basic Qualifications

• Experience programming with at least one modern language such as Java, C++, or C# including object-oriented design
• Experience leading the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems, or experience in development in the last 3 years
• Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team, or experience leading engineering teams as a mentor or tech lead
• Experience building production software applications or understanding software development, distributed systems, and systems architecture
• Experience debugging, profiling, and implementing best software engineering practices in large-scale systems, or experience with general troubleshooting/debugging of hardware

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in computer science or equivalent
• Experience with full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
• Experience with database replication technologies: CDC (Change Data Capture), logical replication, log-based capture (Log Miner, fn_dblog, pgoutput)
• Experience with security vulnerability remediation in production systems
• Experience building automated test frameworks or improving test coverage for complex systems
• Experience with memory safety tooling (Address Sanitizer, Thread Sanitizer, Helgrind)
• Experience operating services at scale (multi-region deployments, large customer fleets)
• Experience with release management and deployment pipelines for large fleets

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