Senior Systems Development Engineer

Description

AWS runs the world's largest fleet of AI/ML accelerator servers. When a model with billions of parameters trains across a large scale of GPUs, every minute of downtime costs real progress. We are building the automation, diagnostics, and predictive intelligence that keeps this fleet running at peak. If you want to work at the intersection of hardware, software, and scale — where your code directly prevents customer-impacting failures — this is the role.

We are seeking a Systems Development Engineer to build automation software, diagnostic tooling, and fleet health infrastructure for our accelerated compute platforms. You will work across multiple teams and organizations to design scalable, reliable systems for our accelerated compute fleet.

What You Will Do
You will tackle problems no one has fully defined yet — spanning hardware, firmware, kernel, and software simultaneously. You will own systems end to end, writing code that prevents failures rather than reacts to them, and building automation that replaces manual toil with intelligent self-healing. You will work across PCIe topology, GPU diagnostics, Linux drivers, and telemetry pipelines to correlate signals and isolate faults at fleet scale. When your system catches a failing GPU before a training job crashes, that is your impact.

Why You Will Love It
Your automation runs at a large scale across servers in the cloud. When you ship, you see failure rates move within days. The team is small enough that your decisions shape the architecture, and large enough that you will always have experts to learn from across hardware, firmware, and software.

The Ideal Candidate
You know the full stack from bare-metal to userland. You debug at the intersection of components, not just within them. You build at cloud scale and care how your systems decisions impact customers. You are an excellent communicator who can drive alignment across hardware, software, and operations teams.


Key job responsibilities
Fleet Health & Predictive Infrastructure

1. Build and own the automation infrastructure for accelerator (AI/ML) fleet health at a large scale of servers, driving toward zero-touch operations that detect, diagnose, triage, and remediate faults without human intervention
2. Design and develop test frameworks, test coverage strategies, and diagnostic tooling to validate hardware functionality, detect faults, and ensure qualification coverage across the platform lifecycle.
3. Design predictive failure detection using telemetry, sensor data, error trending, and log correlation to identify degrading components before customer impact
4. Develop monitoring dashboards and alerting for real-time fleet health visibility across manufacturing, lab, and production environments
5. Define and track fleet health metrics: failure rates, mean time to detect and resolve issues, first-time fix rate, test dwell time, and predictive accuracy

Debugging & Troubleshooting

1. Debug complex system-level issues across compute, GPU, and networking in production — including Linux boot/runtime failures, PCIe, power, NIC, NVMe, and GPU subsystems on x86 and ARM
2. Perform root cause analysis correlating across firmware, kernel, driver, and physical layer; feed findings into manufacturing quality and design improvements

Systems Development & Automation

1. Design scalable test automation for hardware bring-up, regression, and qualification — reducing manufacturing test cycle times without sacrificing coverage through intelligent test sequencing and parallel execution
2. Build data pipelines correlating test results, sensor telemetry, and component-level data to identify systemic yield issues and drive upstream fixes
3. Develop and maintain Linux device drivers on ARM and x86; work with OS internals and accelerator/GPU software stacks
4. Build and manage tests covering all functional aspects of the system and CI/CD pipelines for rapid deployment to manufacturing lines and production fleet

Cross-Team Collaboration

1. Work across engineering teams and internal customers to ensure new accelerated compute hardware meets data path, control path, and onboarding requirements
2. Engage with ODMs and design partners on testability, diagnostic coverage, and automation requirements during hardware design and bring-up phases — influencing functional and performance readiness of the platform
3. Partner with datacenter operations to close the loop between field failures, manufacturing escapes, and design improvements

Operational Excellence

1. Participate in post-incident reviews, identify contributing causes and drive permanent fixes that eliminate whole classes of risk
2. Produce clear, maintainable documentation for systems, runbooks, and automation to enable others to operate and extend your work
3. Drive process improvements that increase team agility — reducing development friction, eliminating unnecessary gates, and improving delivery velocity

May require occasional (<10%) regional and international travel to Design and Manufacturing Partner sites.


A day in the life
You start the day reviewing overnight validation run results, triaging a cluster of GPU errors that correlate with a specific firmware version. Mid-morning, you push a fix to your diagnostic automation pipeline and validate it catches the failure pattern in your test environment. In the afternoon, you join a hardware bring-up call with your ODM partner to debug a PCIe link training failure on a new EVT board, walking the team through kernel logs and signal integrity data. You end the day reviewing a pull request from a teammate on a new telemetry correlation engine, and updating your manufacturing test coverage dashboard with the latest yield data.

About the team
The Hardware Engineering AI/ML UltraServer platform team is a group of engineers and technical program managers directly responsible for launching GPU-accelerated servers into the AWS fleet. Located in Seattle, Austin, and Cupertino, we collaborate with global development teams and ODM partners to deliver next-generation AI/ML infrastructure deployed in datacenters worldwide. We move fast with small, empowered teams delivering end-to-end — from server conception through fleet-scale operations.

Basic Qualifications

- 6+ years of systems design, software development, operations, automation, and process improvement experience
- 6+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 6+ years of programming with at least one modern language such as C++, C#, Java, Python, Golang, PowerShell, Ruby experience
- 6+ years of designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent work experience
- 5+ years of Linux/Unix operating systems experience

Preferred Qualifications

- Master's degree or above in computer science, electrical engineering, or related field
- 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Experience taking a leading role in building complex software or computing infrastructure that has been successfully delivered to customers
- 5+ years of building scripts, tooling, and automation for large-scale computing environments experience
- Experience with general troubleshooting/debugging of hardware, or experience with CUDA kernels or ML/low-level kernels
- 5+ years of hardware design and validation of components, subsystems and systems experience
- Experience leading technical teams through daily operations and maintenance evolutions, or experience in data center engineering or operations

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

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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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.